lundi, 18 février 2019

Cioran’s On France: Thriving Amidst Decay

By Guillaume DurocherEx: http://www.counter-currents.com

Emil CioranDe la France Paris: L’Herne, 2015

This is a strange, vile little book as only Emil Cioran[2] knew how to produce. It was only recently published, in both the original Romanian and in French translation,[1][3] having been written in 1941 and left to languish for decades in some cardboard box in the Cioran archives. Cioran wrote the book in the wake of France’s pathetic defeat in 1940, inspired by his conversations in Parisian cafés and his bicycling through the villages of the French countryside. Contemporary political events are quite understated, however. For Cioran, there is no question of engaging in puerile journalism; in his view, France’s decay was many centuries in the making.

I first read the book some time ago and remembered nothing except a feeling of revulsion. I recently reread it, this time taking notes. As so often with Cioran, when I gather my notes, my initial revulsion gives way as I see the bigger picture and glimmers of hope, and the work ends up being strangely endearing to me.

I don’t know if the author ever meant for the text, which was written in pencil, to be published at all, let alone in its current form. It seems likely it was written in a few inspired bursts of Cioran’s brilliant and morbid Muse. It is a conversion note. Before 1941, Cioran thought in German, had wished he could have been German, and wrote in Romanian, oscillating between despair and the mad hope that a new barbarism could save Romania from irrelevance and Europe from decadence. After 1945, Cioran had settled into his Parisian home and would henceforth write exclusively in French, as a “lucid” aesthete of nihilism and decline.

Why would someone want such an intellectual destiny for oneself? On France explains it. This is a prolonged meditation upon France, her greatness, vanity, and decay, a book-long portrait of the past glories and the steady and pathetic decline of a great nation. Cioran has in fact fallen in love with his adoptive land; it is indeed a love letter. His prose is often overwritten, but quite insightful: “I perceive France rightly by all that is rotten within me” (40). France is decadent, lifeless, and over-intellectual, just like himself. The book opens with an apt anonymous quotation in French: “Collection d’exagérations maladives” (a collection of sickly/obsessive exaggerations). Rest assured there is a point to all of this, if one bears with it.

Cioran, like Nietzsche, writes with a kind of visceral identification with human history and the evolution of our consciousness as recorded in our literature and philosophy. For Cioran, how could one live without being part of a great nation? For him, a nation is a social, linguistic, and ethnic reality culminating in a shared psychic reality; a great nation is an agent influencing the course of human history, rather than a collection of individuals. A nation is a kind of conversation, a shared mind, extending across the centuries; at the same time, nations are equally mortal and artificial creations. Hence for Cioran, “France,” “Germany,” and “Romania” are entities which are at once conventional and whose potentialities and defects are intimately felt, about which the stakes could not be higher.

Cioran’s actual observations on France can be stereotypical or overwritten, but they are often on point and insightful. France had been the quintessential nation, a historical agent like no other, “a nation afflicted with good fortune” (28), which had known a stable and “regular” development (unlike the stagnation of the Balkans, or the erratic history of Germany and Russia). France was a nation which had never been “humiliated by comparisons,” whose people had never felt themselves to be “deracinated” by foreign influences, who had never felt the material or psychological need to emigrate (27). France was a world unto itself, psychologically self-sufficient, and in that sense strangely provincial, at the same time setting the tone for the entire world: “France – like ancient Greece – has been a universal province” (24). The nation could happily develop at her own, leisurely pace, for she was the world.

In this sense, all of Europe, and indeed much of the world, existed in France’s shadow. For all those formless populaces which wanted to be nations, France set the tone for what was “normal.” France had been the “soul of Europe,” a cultural and even political hegemon. Cioran delights in the decline of the “Grande Nation”: “From the Frenchmen of the Crusades, they have become the Frenchmen of the kitchen and the bistrot: bien-être and boredom” (53).

By the time of the Enlightenment, French confidence was also grounded in a belief in reason and progress. This was an “acosmic” culture not troubled by the sublimity and dread of metaphysics, too comfortable in reason, a formal classicism, and an “anti-Dionysian” (80) culture of the head, not of the heart,[2][5] and committed to the “sterile perfection” of writing (24). It became the nation of self-satisfied Alexandrianism.

All that was over and done with. In the late Middle Ages, France had wavered “between the monastery and the salon” (17), before decisively opting for the latter. The French, since the Enlightenment and in particular during the Revolution, were a perfect example of the weakness of “reason” as a guide for a people. France had degenerated from a nation into a mere populace of selfish individualists, hence sterile, and long given to chatter, overrefinement, and gastronomy (one appreciates the overgeneralizations here). The French gave no place to the unconscious, they were not “deep,” and they had become skeptical and unwilling to die for any ideal (38). Because at this time Cioran seems to only have cared for intensity of feeling and belief, he sees the only remaining vitality left in France in Communism and the working class, although her “revolutionary career” was probably over, anyway (73; hence also some Slavophile sentiments, since Cioran never really distinguished between Russians and Communism, 41).

Cioran, a voracious reader with a vast intellectual culture, is extremely critical of French thought and culture throughout history. Cioran foresees a great convergence: France’s bourgeois decadence indicates where all the other nations are heading, and by that decadence she will also really become a “normal” country, as afflicted by doubt and inferiority complexes as all the rest (45, 49). Cioran writes implausibly, “Her decline, obvious for almost a century, has not been opposed by any of her sons with a desperate protest” (63).

By this point, one could fairly accuse the wretch Cioran of sadism. Some kids like to tear the wings off of flies, others just like to watch a once-beautiful flower slowly rot from blight.

Cioran has perhaps only one unambiguously positive thing to say about France, the embrace of fleeting beauty:

France’s divinity: Taste. Good taste.

According to which the world – to exist – must please; must be well-made; consolidate itself aesthetically; have limits; be a graspable enchantment; a sweet flowering [fleurissment] of finitude. (14-15)

He observes that France is “the country of the phenomenon in itself,” of impression, before adding, “If appearances are everything, France is right” (78). Very Zen and very true, no? If life is but a succession of fleeting moments, let them be beautiful.

Cioran luxuriates in France’s decay, and some of the passages are frankly revolting in embellishing – as Alain Soral has complained[6] – spiritual and civilizational rot:

[France] can only live up to [her past] if she accepts her end with style, by masterfully refining a crepuscular culture, by extinguishing herself with intelligence and even with splendor – not without corrupting the freshness of her neighbors or of the world through her decadent infiltrations and dangerous insinuations. (47-48)

There are fecund disintegrations and sterile ones. A great civilization which provincializes itself diminishes its spiritual volume; but, when it spreads the elements of its dissolution, when it universalizes its failure, the twilight retains some symbols of the mind and saves the appearance of nobility. (75)

He also writes, “Of France’s twilight we can only speak in aesthetic terms; we do not feel it, and the French do not feel it either” (59). Well, perhaps a metic could feel this way, but not a Frenchman raised in the knowledge that his country was a great nation among the lights of the world, passed down to us as a sacred patrimony by the sacrifice of millions of French soldiers and peasants. Let us recall Charles de Gaulle’s famous words:

All my life, I have had a certain idea of France. I am inspired in this as much by sentiment as by reason. . . . I instinctively have the impression that Providence has created her for consummate achievements or exemplary misfortunes. If mediocrity marks her deeds and actions, however, I have the feeling of an absurd anomaly, attributable to the faults of the French and not to the genius of the fatherland. But also, the positive side of my mind convinces me that France is only truly herself when she is at the first rank; that only vast enterprises can compensate for the ferments of dispersion which her people carries; that our country, as it is, among the others, as they are us, must, under penalty of death, aim high and stand tall. In short, by my lights, France cannot be France without greatness.

Let it be said that Charles de Gaulle, for all his failures[7], passed this conviction on to the more earnest and impressionable minds of the younger generation through this myth – those who only-too-naïvely took their elders’ words at face value, and who could therefore only be shocked by the nation’s decomposition and slouching into mediocrity. And are de Gaulle’s words not also true, to a great extent, for Europeans in general, who always yearn to dedicate themselves heart and soul to a great cause, without which they are prone to living like dogs? And I cannot tell you how many idealistic young Europeans I have met, who are among the best of our race, who dedicate themselves to the Third World, for there can still be found struggle, sacrifice, and emotional depth and intensity, which can only contrast with the superficiality and barrenness – a rare spiritual oblivion – of coddled life in the post-war West.

I can see a point in Cioran’s musing, but there is also something disgusting – and in some respects simply noxious – for both France and Europe. Cioran, in fact, seems torn: generally favoring belief and fanaticism as the antithesis of decadence (hence sympathy for Hitlerism and Bolshevism), but occasionally observing that perhaps Europe needs a bit of doubt, which France could bring (65).

Cioran is convinced of the catastrophic effects of the illusions of “reason” and “progress.” But if France, the pioneer-nation of the Enlightenment, would cease to believe in such follies . . . surely Western man could finally awaken from these self-satisfied, sterilizing slogans! Or, at least, Cioran believes he, as an “intellectual vampire” (60), could be a lucid and fecund writer in this context. He leapfrogs centuries of history:

Hailing from primitive lands, the Wallachian underworld, with the pessimism of youth, and then arriving in an overly ripe civilization, what a source of shivers before such a contrast! Without a past amidst an enormous past . . . From the pasture to the salon, from the shepherd to Alcibiades! (66)

Hence, Cioran loves France because she has fallen from self-assured greatness into a doubt and pessimism much like his own. Whereas he had previously loved Hitlerian Germany for its irrational faith, he now presents France as a mirror image of himself, an entire nihilist country in which he might be able to achieve the highest lucidity:

An entire country which no longer believes in anything, what an exalting and degrading spectacle! To hear them, from the lowest of citizens to the most lucid, say the obvious with detachment: “La France n’exist plus,” “Nous sommes finis,” “Nous n’avons plus d’avenir, “Nous sommes un pays en décadence,” what a reinvigorating lesson, when you are no longer a devotee of delusions! (69)

France is “a consoling space” for Cioran: “With what impatience I have awaited this outcome, so fertile for melancholic inspiration!” (70). The wandering and soon-to-be stateless Cioran wants to limit himself to a particular culture and place: “He who embraces too much falsifies the world, but in the first instance, himself . . . A great soul enclosed in the French forms, what a fecund type of humanity!” (87). France’s comfortable decadence will shield Cioran from his own excesses: “Let her measure cure us of pathetic and fatal wanderings” (32), “A country’s lack of life will protect us against the dangers of life” (88). Crepuscular France will finally give Cioran the opportunity to be in harmony with his time: “Alexandrianism is erudite debauchery as a system, theoretical breathing at the twilight, a moaning of concepts – and the only moment when the soul can harmonize its darkness with the objective unfolding of the culture” (70).

In short, Cioran seizes the opportunity to join a decadent, highly intellectual nation, so as to explore the depths of nihilism and see where one emerges. I can appreciate this kind of personal and philosophical project.

Cioran carves a role out for himself as a fertilizing maggot in the corpse of French civilization. Cioran, not disinterestedly, affirms that the greatness of a nation can be measured by its ability to inspire metics to join and serve it, which I suppose is partly true (92-94). Cioran then foresees his own destiny in this new home:

What would I do if I were French? I would rest in Cynicism. (40)

France needs a pathetic and cynical Paul Valéry, an absolute artist of the void and of lucidity. (48)

My destiny is to wrap myself in the dregs of civilizations. How can I show my strength except by resisting in the midst of rot? The relationship between barbarism and neurasthenia balances this formula. An aesthete of the twilight of cultures, I turn my gaze of storm and dreams upon the dead waters of the mind . . . (65)

To refuse to go extinct, even though we have delighted in the inevitable march towards extinction. (82)

A kind of moribund fury lies in the aesthetes of decadence. (84)

Cioran affirms that decadence can only be overcome, not through sentimental nostalgia or insincere conservatism, but by uncompromisingly going deeper . . . perhaps then nihilism will be transcended? That which is falling ought to be pushed, that which doesn’t kill us, and so on.

On France seems to be a book-long philosophical exercise. There are well-established traditions in this kind of morbid meditation in both Stoicism and Buddhism, schools which strongly resonated with Cioran. In Stoic analysis, one breaks down an object to its most essential, unappetizing forms so as to overcome our desires with objectivity. As Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations:

When you have savories and fine dishes set before you, you will gain an idea of their nature if you tell yourself that this is the corpse of a fish, and that the corpse of a bird or a pig; or again, that fine Falernian wine is merely grape juice, and this purple robe some sheep’s wool dipped in the blood of a shellfish; and as for sexual intercourse, it is the friction of a piece of gut and, following a sort of convulsion, the expulsion of some mucus. Thoughts such as these reach through to the things themselves and strike to the heart of them, allowing us to see them as they truly are. So follow this practice throughout your life, and where things seem most worthy of your approval, lay them naked, and see how cheap they are, and strip them of the pretenses of which they are so vain. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.13)

The Buddhists attribute a similar meditative exercise to Gautama: contemplating the various aspects of our being (mind, body, actions, including defecation and urination), breaking down our body into parts, and indeed contemplating our body subject to various degrees of decomposition (notably in the Satipatṭhāna Sutta). By this, one attains a certain objectivity and imperviousness, one is learning to look the truth in the face without flinching.

On France appears to be the fruit of this kind of philosophical exercise. By stripping France of her pretensions and even the usual dignities necessary for a nation or an individual’s self-respect, Cioran sees his new home objectively. This is indeed one of Cioran’s “nay-saying, corrosive books,” a challenge, the overcoming of which will make us stronger.

In the 1920s and ’30s, no one denied the decadence which already afflicted the France of the Third Republic. No one today can deny that all Europe is decadent, unashamed of her impotence and dedicated to the most impoverished materialist and humanitarian principles, consecrated to the Last Man foreseen by Nietzsche, and with no end in sight. Given all this, Cioran’s observations and his challenge remain deeply relevant to us. Cioran is torn, but points to the need for decidedly modern barbarians: “I dream of a culture of oracles in logic, of lucid Pythias . . . and of a man who would control his reflexes with a supplement of life, and not through austerity” (89).

En guise de conclusion, I recall the words of the Buddha:

Just as a sweet-smelling and pleasant lotus grows on a heap of refuse flung on the high road, so a disciple of the Fully Awakened One shines resplendent in wisdom among the blind multitude, the refuse of beings. (Dhammapada, 58-59)

Some translated excerpts from this book will be published at Counter-Currents in the coming days.

Notes

[1][8] The French edition is incidentally quite elegant and has been printed using blue ink.

[2][9] Cioran often writes of nations having or lacking vigor “in the blood,” using this word strangely more in a psychological than hereditarian sense.

Postmodernism on the Right: A Case for Adopting Deconstructing as a Tool

By EumaiosEx: http://www.counter-currents.com

One of the realities that must be recognized by the Dissident Right, particularly in the Anglophone world, is that that those modes of thought and analysis broadly encapsulated by terms like postmodernism, critical theory, or the Frankfurt School are not inherently “Left-wing.” Collectively and individually, they are not inherently anything other than a means to an end. It was a success on the part of those who deployed these framing techniques that they convinced so many that they were actual philosophical positions. This sleight-of-hand duped several generations of Western society into believing that deployers of “critique” were arguing in good faith. Postmodernism and its cognate modes of thought and analysis could never amount to an end in themselves because they are by definition null space. Postmodernism is the analytic imperative to stand nowhere at no time, and critical theory is an injunction to critique and deconstruct from outside a value structure, not to imagine or construct one. That is not to say, however, that these intellectual currents belong to those with no values of their own.

The “ends” of deconstruction were conceived through an entirely separate mode of discourse to deconstruction itself. The Left-wing innovators of critical theory and postmodernism imagined replacing the foundational and time-tested cultural frameworks that their timeless and valueless intellectual techniques would destroy, with social constructs built on Left-wing values. These Left-wing values did not emerge from, nor were they explicitly present in, the instrumentalized nihilism of deconstruction. Quite the opposite, in fact. It is no secret that the values which animate Leftist thinkers derive from Enlightenment thought. Enlightenment streams of thought positively moralize on universal terms. They do so from initial constructs of sacred meaning that tend to be less internally challenged by the community adhering to them than were the moral precepts of the Catholic Church. The base of Leftist thought is thus anything but the hyper-self-aware and indiscriminately critical frame of nihilism that defines deconstruction.

Therefore, rather than “Leftist” schools of thought, the tools of deconstruction are better understood as weapons which may have proved more powerful than even their own progenitors thought they ever would be. I need not belabor this point. Most of you have undoubtedly encountered the logical shutdowns and bouts of indignant fury caused by simply and honestly considering the possibility that peoples of European descent may have their own collective history and that it may be legitimate for those who share that history, and its subsets, to preserve their biological heritage or act in their own interests. As many before me have pointed out, this is the net effect of deconstruction. In two generations, it rendered the most powerful family of peoples in human history a demographic nonentity struggling to even justify their own continued existence as recognizable peoples in their own homelands.

It is unsurprising, considering its net effect, that those who wish for peoples of European descent to have group autonomy/autonomies, and to continue existing in any recognizable way, consider deconstruction to be a pure and unmitigated evil. However, as I mentioned earlier, it is only a tool. This remains true regardless of whether or not it was a tool first used by those whose ideal future involves everything you find most sacred, including what you call your own people, ceasing to exist as you believe it to be doing now. Consequently, like any tool, you can use it yourself if you can figure out how it works.

Science is only your friend if you make it that way

I am aware that many who are right of center will contend that they do not need such beguiling linguistic contrivances, because they have “science” on their side. Surely it is only the Left that needs to make reality appear a certain way, because it is only the Left who adhere to a worldview that runs counter to objective truth? Perhaps this is true, but regardless of whether it is, “objective truth” is not synonymous with “science.” To assume such a thing is to mistakenly conflate non-human-created realities, and empirical evidence collected about the nature of those realities, with a set of social practices. This social dimension includes the conventions that define different scientific disciplines, as well as the role that science plays as a regulator of mainstream society. If it were true that all these phenomena constituted an indissoluble entity called “science,” and that the definition of this entity was coextensive with that of objective truth, then the Dissident Right would need to make some undesired concessions.

Among such concessions would be that it is unscientific to form a research community around sociobiology, or to explore the possibility that the individual selection model of evolution may not capture all aspects of natural selection, and that group-level fitness may play a role. After all, this remains the official view of mainstream science, which is a testament to the success of the Left-wing Sociobiological Study Group. This scientific research community arose in response to E. O. Wilson’s Harvard-based sociobiological research circle, and it functioned with the sole purpose of preventing sociobiology ever becoming a scientific discipline.[1][2] Another necessary concession would be that it is not “scientific” to form a research community focused on population genetics and intelligence, as the recent “investigations” of such a community by the managers of institutional science at University College London have indicated.[2][3] Finally, if the social practices and institutions of “science” are coextensive with objective truth, the Dissident Right would have to accept that the categories of male and female “have no basis in science,” and thus whatever social customs have been organized around that binary system are illegitimate. This revelation is, after all, the official position of what is surely the uncontested apogee of scientific knowledge and authority: the journal Nature.[3][4] If the official position of the editors of Nature does not constitute authoritative scientific truth, then what else could?

What these unfortunate situations have hopefully made clear is that “science” has proven to be no more capable of preventing itself from being deconstructed into the narrative of social justice than even the most “airy fairy” of humanities departments. This is because scientific disciplines are social practices, and always have been. The institutions carrying scientific authority over mainstream Western ontology are clearly not interested in revealing “objective truth,” but in shaping society in accordance with the cultural Left’s interpretation of “Enlightenment” principles. The reason for this is that the most powerful institutions of science have already been convinced that either “objective truth” does not exist, or at least that it is less meaningful than the pursuit of “progress.” Even the ever-unstable “scientific method,” purported to unite the work of all those disciplines bearing the name “science,” is the formulation of philosophers or scientists acting as philosophers, and not a revelation of objective truth made by science itself. The most recent iteration of the “scientific method,” generally described as “falsifiability,” is the work of Karl Popper, a scientifically uninitiated philosopher whose work and general worldview inspired the machinations of none other than George Soros.[4][5]

My intention is not to argue that science is only shaped by social forces, and never provides access to objective truth, or at least the nearest thing to it. I don’t think that is true. Hilary Putnam’s “No Miracles” argument, which generally asserts that “scientific realism” is the only way to explain the success of scientifically-derived technology without resorting to miracles, indicates that science can indeed do more than simply reflect social arrangements.[5][6] However, regardless of whether or not science offers a route to objective truth, it should not be treated as a monolith. The practices that define scientific disciplines, and those which delineate the wider community whose members are recognized as practitioners of “science,” are mediated through social forces. The Right’s refusal to accept that science is, at least to some degree, social and political in both its inner and outer workings has allowed its enemies to go unchallenged in consolidating their influence over “science” as an institution of public authority. If “science” alone could not prevent itself from being deconstructed into a puppet of Leftist progressivism, on what grounds should anyone believe that appealing to “science” would help in a culture war against the Left? “Science” is powerfully influenced by social values in the areas that matter most, and the cultural Left are the only ones who have worked to insert any such values among scientific communities. The Right must deconstruct scientific practice to remove these values, before reinserting their own.

To be clear, I am not arguing against objective truth. I think there are perfectly good reasons to believe that it exists, and that it is the most sensible position to assume that it exists. All I wish to argue is that the highly diffuse agglomeration of institutions, social conventions, material objects, and historically contingent practices which now happen to be labeled under the term “science” should be scrutinized independently of each other. “Science” should not be considered the single best route to truth at all times, in the same way that such may be true of thinking in a way that tries to avoid internal contradictions to explain something with all available evidence. High degrees of accuracy in physics does not imply that geneticists were pursuing an objective truth in targeting the genetic evidence for Cheddar Man’s skin color, nor that their findings reflect any such objective truth.

Deconstruction as rhetoric for the academy

The discourse of deconstruction loosely referred to as postmodernism is particularly valuable to the Dissident Right. This is because it allows one to think creatively outside the modernist set of rails which emerged from the conditions that obtained of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western Europe and America. Riding through history on these rails has resulted in European-derived peoples finding themselves where they are now. As such, it would make sense for those who find the present condition unacceptable, and who wish to move those of European descent toward an alternative, to value a socially acceptable way to think outside the mode of thought that got them to where they currently are. Fróði Midjord and others have already pointed to the importance of the Dissident Right coming to understand and use postmodernism’s discovery of “hyper-realism.” He has described how this can be done by deconstructing the political baggage carried by most products of Western media. This is, of course, absolutely correct, and its importance can’t be overstated. However, I am referring to the reengineering of another one of postmodernism’s capacities. This capacity has more to do with brute rhetoric than with the self-aware deconstructive reflection that Mr. Midjord proposes. The following anecdote will hopefully demonstrate what this rhetorical capacity looks like when properly deployed.

Having recently gone to a seminar in my department, I noted an interesting phenomenon. There were a number of faces there which I had not seen before. One was a faculty member I had encountered once or twice, and the others were clearly four of her Ph.D. students. The seminar concerned a new way to approach species demarcation, a question that inevitably involves the application of a normative standard to define a biological population. After the talk came the questions I have heard so many times before, and they revealed the reason these new faces were here: “What provision does your model make for variations between individuals?”, “Isn’t a normative value system exclusionary?”, “How is your idea different from rhetorical tools that enlist scientific authority to pathologize and exclude ‘the other’?”, and so on.

It became clear at this point what was going on and why I had never seen these people at other seminars. It was because they only appear at seminars which are not directly related to their “field,” when they believe the content of that seminar either weakens their deontic framework, or is classed as morally objectionable by it. It is in these cases that they not only attend, but attend in force to dominate the question period with their “critique.” Evidently, one full-time staff hire had become a vector for an army of received morality enforcers, whose complete academic energies are dedicated to reinforcing their ideology and deploying it as the only lens through which they ever encounter other ideas. This was a social justice wolfpack.

Unsurprisingly, the speaker, like nearly all modern academics, had never interrogated his own deontic frame, making his implicit value system generally consistent with that symbolized by the “NPC” meme. He was not a social justice inquisitor himself, which was why he was applying his academic energy to an entirely separate subject. Nonetheless, he presumed tropes like “inclusion,” “diversity,” and “tolerance” to be moral imperatives, without ever considering what these words mean either in absolute terms or in different contexts. As such, the social justice enforcers didn’t have to locate any internal weaknesses in his argument to assault it. In fact, they didn’t have to engage with the logic or evidence he presented at all. All they had to do was point out where the supporting evidence and framework of logic, which undoubtedly took him months to compile and build, didn’t align with their own conceptual framework. Being that the speaker unquestioningly presumed the foundational axioms of this framework (which the wolfpack simply took to their logical extremes), all he could do was sheepishly accept their “critique” as revealing genuine flaws in his argument, apologize for these errors, and gradually retreat from nearly all the interesting points he had made. It took them seconds to use a set of ideas, that they acquired in hours, to defeat the framework of logic and evidence that took him months or years to construct.

One point illustrated by this anecdote is that the universities are not inherently impenetrable to a system of thought or analysis operating outside a non-Leftist frame. If they were, then there would be no need for Leftist wolfpacks to patrol conferences or workshops. Their critique of this man’s ideas were “correct,” to a degree. Many mainstream academics regularly, and unintentionally, introduce new ideas that lend themselves to strengthening the normative axioms from which the Dissident Right views the world, or at least could be repurposed that way with minimal effort. However, the second, and seemingly contradictory, point to take away from my anecdote is that the universities, at their deepest level of social convention, are not as free as the “Alt Lite” or “intellectual darkweb” presume that they are. The now-ubiquitous whining about “the SJWs!” emerging from “radical” publications like Quillete paint a picture of a few totalitarian puritans somehow perverting an otherwise completely free and functional domain of academic discourse. However, it is clearly the mainstream social rules of academic discourse themselves that grant such unholy power to the social justice priesthood. These rules mean that enforcers of social justice need only one “knockout” argument to defeat every idea from every other field, with near-zero intellectual energy expenditure. This universally effective tool is actually no argument at all, but a formula for merely identifying where any new ideas may come at the cost of their own unquestionable mandates for “inclusion,” “diversity,” or “tolerance.”

It is clear that any families of thought, such as the Dissident Right, which are genuinely dedicated to creatively exploring new ways to approach fundamental perspectives on the world simply do not have the ability to counteract the ideology of social justice, while its adherents win every argument by simply “deconstructing” everything into their own frame, while closing that frame to critique. This cannot be solved by only “deconstructing” the weaponized messages they dispatch in your direction. This is simply defense. It is their frame that needs to be challenged. However, because this frame is morally charged, it needs to be challenged by deconstruction from a different frame, whose adherents must hold it, whether explicitly or implicitly, to be morally self-evident. This is not the realm of positive discourse and dialectic, but that of rhetoric. Vox Day has made some sound observations on this point.

Rhetorically speaking, I will concede to my critics that introducing discourse from outside the conceptual rails which the Left derisively calls “bourgeois” values may appear absurd, obscurantist, or downright hostile by the bulk of Westerners who tend toward Right-wing thinking. My personal bias tells me that this is a signal that the structure of social conventions which ascribe meaning to the sacred values that the Dissident Right is trying to protect are worth protecting. To have a negative gut response to something that manifests nothingness and nowhere, as does postmodernism, is healthy. Considering that postmodernism was introduced into the academy only to destroy, it is also healthy to intuitively oppose it for that reason. I wouldn’t personally value a community who worship nuclear weapons for being engines of destruction. However, if you have any desire at all of gaining a foothold in the universities, which have proven to be an extremely powerful piece on the culture-war chessboard, deconstruction is not only a potentially effective strategy to adopt, but is, in my estimation, singularly necessary.

Some possible attack vectors in the universities

As I mentioned earlier, the Left’s worldview is not itself a product of deconstruction. This makes it vulnerable to the latter. Yet as things stand, academic agents of social justice remain spared from justifying what might be called the “opportunity cost” of universalizing their system of thought. This means that those applying Leftist “critique” are free to presume that something which comes at the cost of what they call “social justice” is necessarily an intellectual and moral hindrance to their opponent’s argument. Thus, whenever an agent of social justice begins a debate with the target of his “critique,” the entirety of his intellectual energy may be spent on positively pursuing his rhetorical objectives (which are coextensive with his moral objectives). He never has to defensively justify those objectives or the metaphysical presumptions upon which they are founded. By contrast, when all other actors in Western societies, academic or otherwise, encounter agents of social justice, they must split their energies between justifying why their objectives are worthwhile in positive terms, and then explaining how their objectives do not conflict with the ends of social justice. This leaves those subjected to a social justice critique only minimal intellectual energy to actually make their own arguments. It is this asymmetrical freedom to conserve their intellectual and rhetorical resources which converted shrieking harpies of usually moderate-to-low intelligence into feared academic arbiters to whom even the most brilliant professors defer in a debate.

A vocabulary needs to be developed which does to the initial axioms presumed by social justice what it did to the initial axioms of the paradigms that it was used to destroy. The ends of social justice themselves need to be found to be potentially “problematic” through another critical lens. This weaponized vocabulary must be built on a moral framework which presumes that, even if social justice were effectively executed, it would come at the cost of other things which are of greater value. This will allow for a rhetorically effective way to simply bypass having to defend an idea from a social justice critique, while simultaneously putting the deployer of that critique on the defensive. They will then have to waste time and energy finding ways to justify their own normative assumptions, with each attempt making them appear more linguistically deceptive and morally suspect.

This task is slow and difficult, but not impossible. It also gets easier as more absurd Leftist assumptions are identified and left out in the open. For instance, Leftist critiques nearly always assume that “inclusion” is a positive thing. They see inclusion as synonymous with “progress” and “equality,” and this predicates their strategy of doubting the grounds for which any category they don’t like excludes things. However, inclusion can just as easily be synonymous with regression and destruction. The existence of a hospital building, for instance, is predicated on the assumption that exclusion can be a good and constructive thing, which in turn presumes that universal inclusion relative to hospital buildings is a bad and destructive thing. If every possible thing were forced to be included in a hospital building, the category would be meaningless, and what might have been a hospital building would simply be a pile of rubble. Yet, every hospital building embodies the notion that some things belong and others do not. This embodiment presumes both differences between things, as well as an implicit hierarchy relative to what is “good” for the category “hospital building.”

A Leftist critique would point out that there are no objective grounds to support the implicit hierarchy that gives the normative category “hospital building” any meaning. From this, they would contend that your “hospital building” category is arbitrary, since they assume that any subjective values and hierarchies apart from their own are “arbitrary” by definition. This in turn allows them to imply that what is “true” could not be what motivates anyone to police the category “hospital building.” This leaves only the possibility that the category “hospital building,” which the victim of the critique chooses to police, is an imposition on the world, which could only be motivated by a desire to separate things, exclude things, and make some things inferior to other things. This is the essential nature of their notion of “oppression” which, as I have shown, could be used against literally anything they take issue with, for whatever reason. That is how agile and adaptable the Left’s rhetorical tools are. One who values hospital buildings may even be shown to be “xenophobic,” as their subjective category would “arbitrarily” exclude black people from comprising a part of hospital buildings. After all, the inclusion of black people in the superstructure of hospital buildings would be deemed to be something negative by anyone who values the structural integrity of hospital buildings. Yet we have already shown that anyone who believes in the oppressive social construct “hospital buildings” could only ever be motivated by the love of “division,” “judgment,” and ultimately, “hate.”

The Left’s academic strategy rests on the hope that the opponent will forget that their categories have, or may have, implicit value. If one points this out, and argues from the assumption that, for instance, the category of “hospital building” has implicit value, it can easily be shown that the “inclusion,” which the Left presumes to be a universal good, is in fact destructive. However, it cannot always be known if a category has value, and in some cases that value may only be knowable by those within the category. This is one of the foundations of the postmodern critique.

Academics sympathetic to the Dissident Right, or simply to challenging the status quo, should be asking their hecklers what the expense of forced “inclusion” might be, and what makes the Leftist heckler in question believe they have the moral legitimacy to enforce it. Another question that should be asked is if “inclusion” and “diversity” are necessarily desirable at all levels of everything, at all times? If so, why? One does not need to know the answers to these questions to effectively deploy them against proponents of social justice, if that deployment occurs with an equivalent degree of moral indignation. Fortunately, that indignation can be justified.

The great irony of social justice, as I see many on the Dissident Right are already aware, is that universal “diversity” at every level and at all times destroys the requisite particularities of “diversity”, because each discrete category becomes homogenized. The imposition of a universally distributed degree of “diversity” in a class of categories makes all the categories exactly the same, thus rendering them meaningless. Yet in social terms, within each category may exist an identity, way of life, or normative framework from which humans moralize and act. Forced “inclusion” and “diversity” thus destroys all categories everywhere at all times, and these impositions also come at the cost of other normative frameworks, from which people may derive meaning and purpose. Among such frameworks, one might include the “indigenous ways of knowing” of the Tiwi people, but also the foundational value structure of the Dissident Right. By pointing out what is being unthinkingly destroyed, the moral presumptions of universalist social justice can be framed as destructive, mindless, homogenizing impositions emerging from centers of power, which would strip the Left’s “critique” of its radical facade.

Another effective approach would be to “historicize” social justice. Social justice scholars never have to consider the historical contingency of their own analytical frame, despite regularly using this historicizing imperative as a blunt instrument against every other mode of discourse, e.g. “science studies.” This is because, up until now, they were the only ones comfortable arguing in such abominably bad faith. However, it would be both appropriate and effective for modern scholarship to ask “under what conditions of privilege did the homogenizing imperative of ‘social justice’ emerge?”, and “To what extent are the supposed standards of social justice merely historically contingent obsessions of powerful actors trying to forcibly shape the world in their image?” Courses that emerge one day may include “social justice in context,” in which the “aggressive triumphalism” of social justice is explored as a product of the toxic climate of “implicit oikophobia” which prevailed in the mid- to late-twentieth century. This would provide a non-resource intensive way to pathologize social justice within a prearranged narrative that could be easily transported to multiple sites.

Another key function of the historical approach is to depict social justice as being contingent on forces apart from itself, which diffuses the implicit assumption that it was “inevitable.” This is important, because something can only be considered “progress” that internally presumes the inevitability of historical movement toward its own endpoint. Take that away, and social justice simply becomes one cluster of reasoning from which humans derive meaning, among many. It ceases to be the truth and becomes a convention, which thus could only exist where it was imposed by agents with power trying to pursue more power. This technique is what the Left calls “parochializing,” and it proved deadly effective in destroying the Western Canon, leading to a generation of Europeans with no binding sense of a past, future, or present culture.

Conclusion

So what is the takeaway message from all of this? The Dissident Right and those sympathetic to its cause rest the legitimacy and meaning of their ideas on a set of values. This it shares with the Left, despite its initial values being different. However, what the Dissident Right does not share with the Left is the ability to “deconstruct” its opponent’s set of values. Academic enforcers of social justice have mastered the art of “deconstructing” all neutral parties whose discourse is in good faith, but they have no weapons against those whose discourse may be in bad faith. They know how to manipulate language, but not how to respond to their language being manipulated. To frame their analysis as morally suspect rhetoric and to demand that they justify it, is to force the social justice enforcer back into the realm of dialectic, a discourse in which they are generally incompetent. However, getting them there is not within the domain of dialectic itself.

A rhetorical strategy must be designed and agreed upon by a small community of people, who will need to train others to be dedicated to the task of “deconstructing” the deconstructors, if there is to be any hope for your side of the culture war to have a fair hearing in the academy. As such, I advise undercover academics to resist putting their energies toward positive arguments that support the worldview of the Dissident Right, at least at this point in time. Rather, they should make contact with each other and begin formulating a way to plausibly sell moral disgust at the most basic assumptions made by agents of social justice, and thus corrupt the moral firmware on which it runs. This may sound ridiculous, but it has already been accomplished with the tools of postmodernism.

The postmodernists of yesteryear conditioned an entire generation of white Westerners to be disgusted by the core moral axiom that once underwrote the “progressive” activities of their white Western predecessors. This axiom was the belief in the moral imperative to “civilize” the non-Western world. It underwrote the morality that justified the imperial march of “progress” as foundationally as “inclusion” and “diversity” underwrite the “progressive” activities of modern Leftists. The fact that mainstream discourse puts the word “civilize” in quotation marks today is a testament to the success of the postmodernists in deconstructing away an entire moral framework. It can be your success, too, and must be. Before any honest work can be done by anyone toward building anything new in academia, we must remove the cultural Left’s ability to destroy without consequence. This will involve identifying and deconstructing the platform from which they do it. This will need to occur with the same singlemindedness and cynicism that accompanied the rhetorical brilliance of Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer, and later Foucault, Lacan, and Latour.

dimanche, 27 janvier 2019

Growing up in France, I was never attracted to Emil Cioran’s nihilist and pessimistic aesthetic as a writer. Cioran was sometimes presented to us as unflinchingly realistic, as expressing something very deep and true, but too dark to be comfortable with. I recently had the opportunity to read his De l’inconvénient d’être né (On the Trouble with Being Born) and feel I can say something of the man.

The absolutely crucial fact, the elephant in the room, the silently screaming subtext concerning Cioran is that he had been in his youth a far-Right nationalist, penning positive appraisals of Adolf Hitler and a moving ode to the murdered Romanian mystic-fascist leader Cornelius Zelea Codreanu. Cioran had hoped for the “transfiguration” of Romania into a great nation through zeal and sacrifice. Instead, you got utter defeat and Stalinist tyranny and retardation. I’d be depressed too.

A perpetual question for me is: Why did such great intellectuals (we could add Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Ezra Pound, Knut Hamsun, Mircea Eliade . . .) support the “far-Right”? This is often not so clear because the historical record tends to be muddied both by apologetics (“he didn’t really support them”) and anathemas (“aha! You see! He’s a bad man!”). Like John Toland, I don’t want to condemn or praise, I just want to understand: Why did he believe in this? Was it:

Fear of communism?

Skepticism towards democracy and preference for a stable, spirited regime? (That argument was very popular among thinking men in the 1920s, even the notorious Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, spiritual godfather of the European Union, supported Italian Fascism on these grounds!)

Racialism?

Anti-Semitism?

Opposition to decadence?

The dangerous propensity of many intellectuals for ecstatic spasms and mystical revolutions?

In Cioran’s case, his Right-wing sentiment appears to have been motivated by 1), 2), 4) 5), and perhaps especially 6).

After the war, Cioran renounced his Right-wing past. This may have been motivated by understandable revulsion at the horrors of the Eastern Front and the concentration camps. In any event, this was certainly not a disinterested move. Mircea Eliade – a fellow supporter of Codreanu who later thrived as a historian of religions at the University of Chicago, infiltrating the academy with Traditionalists – wrote of Cioran in his diary on September 22, 1942: “He refuses to contribute anything to German newspapers, in order not to compromise himself in the eyes of his French friends. Cioran, like all the others, foresees the fall of Germany and the victory of Communism. This is enough to detach him from everything.”[1]

There had been a thriving far-Right French literary and intellectual scene, with writers who often had had both a fascist and pan-European sensibility. The Libération in 1944 put an end to that: Robert Brasillach was executed by the Gaullist government during the Épuration (Purge) despite the protestations of many fellow writers (including André Malraux and Albert Camus), Pierre Drieu La Rochelle committed suicide, and Lucien Rebatet was jailed for seven years and blacklisted.

As literally an apatride metic (he would lose his Romanian citizenship in 1946), Cioran, then, did not have much of a choice if he wished to exist a bit in postwar French intellectual life, which went from the fashionable Marxoid Jean-Paul Sartre on the left to the Jewish liberal-conservative Raymond Aron on the right. (I actually would speak highly of Aron’s work on modernity as measured, realistic, and empirical, quite refreshing as far as French writers go. Furthermore he was quite aware of Western decadence and made a convincing case for the culturally-homogeneous nation-state as “the political masterpiece.”) Although Cioran had written several bestsellers in his native Romania, he had to adapt to a French environment or face economic and literary oblivion. What’s an apology secured under coercion actually worth?

This is the context in which we must read De l’inconvénient d’être né. These are the obsessive grumblings of a depressed insomniac. (Cioran’s more general mood swings between lyrical ecstasy and doom-and-gloom suggest bipolar disorder.) His aphorisms often ring true, but equally tend to be hyperbolic or exaggerated, and are almost always negative, like a demotivational Nietzsche. In some respects preferable to Nietzsche, insofar as the great explosion the German hysteric foresaw is past us, and his brand of barbaric politics seems quite impossible in this century. Cioran, like Nietzsche and Spengler, knows that nihilism and decadence are the order of the day, but living in the postwar era, he can certainly no longer hope that “blond beasts” or “Caesarism” might still save us. Cioran in this sense is more relatable, he is talking about our world.

Cioran despairs at the inevitable mediocrity of human beings and the vain temporality of the human condition. (What’s the point of even a good feeling or event, if this event will, in a second, disappear and only exist in my memory, which will in turn disappear? This will no doubt have occurred to thoughtful, angsty teenagers.) Birth, embodiment, is the first tragedy – like the fall of man – from a perfect non-existence, with limitless potentiality, to a flawed and stunted being.

Jean-François Revel observes: “Imagine Pascal’s mood if he had learned that he had lost his bet, and you’ll have Cioran.”

A question: Was Cioran’s despair more motivated by being a Rightist spurned by destiny or by his own dark temperament? Would he have written such works in a triumphant Axis Europe?

Cioran is like a Buddha (the spiritual figure most often cited in De l’inconvénient) who stopped halfway, that is to say, at nihilism and despair. But Siddhartha Gautama went further, from the terrifying recognition of our impermanent and insubstantial experiential reality, to a new mental state, reconciled with this reality, to the path of sovereignty and freedom.

Had I been able to meet him, I’d have invited Cioran to my Zendō – where speaking, indeed all expression of human stupidity, is formally banned through the most truthful silence. And how good is truth for the soul!

The Way of Awakening is not found in books.

Actually, Cioran’s Buddhist connection should be dug into. The Zen monk Taisen Deshimaru was in Paris passing on the Dharma to Europe at exactly the same time, in the 1970s.

My initial response to De l’inconvénient was annoyance that it had been written (I can quite understand Alain Soral’s frustration with Cioran). The postwar Cioran can certainly seem like an umpteenth authorized manifestation of the ‘glamorously aesthetic’ French décadent intellectual, the misunderstood genius, the starving artist, who is just way ‘too deep’ for his own good or for you plebs to grasp.

I remember his 1941 On France, a perversely playful ode to decadentFrance (those three words together disgust me), as an ostensibly appalling little work. France does not need any more encouragement on the downward path.

Cioran certainly has a morbid fascination with spiritual rot.

The Germans of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were already quite right to want to preserve themselves from the contagion of French decadence (oh sure, there’s a straight line of Kultur from the “Indo-Germans” to Frederick the Great’s Prussia); right up to the May-June 1940 editions of Signal understatedly mocking the infertile French with photographs of fez- and turban-wearing Negro and Mohammedan POWs. (Apologies for not providing a direct link to the relevant Signal issues, apparently our historians have still not got around to digitizing this publication, peak circulation 2.5 million in 1943.)

De l’inconvénient initially reinforced my impression that the postwar Cioran was not worth reading. However, there are some hopeful diamonds in the despairing rough. Some of Cioran’s aphorisms are actually quite inspiring, such as the following: “Any overcoming of desire empowers us. We have all the more control over this world as we take our distance from it, when we do not commit to it. Renunciation confers limitless power” (p. 44). (And let us bear in mind again Eliade’s paraphrase above, that it was the prospect of German defeat and communist triumph which was “enough to detach him from everything.”)[2]

On one level, Cioran’s work is a legitimate expression of the depths of postwar despair. From the psychological point of view, man really was (and is still, despite a few flickers) sinking more and more into untruth, into materialism and consumerism and ‘choice,’ into a childish view of life, one not cognizant of our nature as mortal, social, and unequal beings. All the truths contained in our dying traditions, however imperfect the latter were, are forgotten.

Amidst the politically-harmless mass of depressing and demotivational thoughts, Cioran sneaks in some very true observations about decadence. This shows, as plainly as anything, that he remained a man of the Right in his heart.

I believe Cioran provides a key to understanding his nihilist work in this book, namely:

We get a grip on ourselves, and we commit all the more to being, by reacting against nay-saying, corrosive books [livres négateurs, dissolvants], against their noxious power. These are, in short, books that fortify, because they summon the energy which contradicts them. The more poison they contain, the greater their salutary effect, as long as we read them against the grain, as we should read any book, starting with the catechism. (p. 97)

Cioran is putting forth a challenge to be overcome: taste the depths of my despair, truly contemplate and acknowledge the futility of life . . . What is your answer?

Cioran’s books: contemplation of the void . . . a summoning.

I find Cioran both uncomfortable and stimulating, clamoring for more, eager to discover and accomplish more. Fecund stimulation is most important, whether in reading, work, or life. (For that reason I also recommend reading Ezra Pound’s non-fiction.)

Cioran’s nihilist and depressing aesthetic will not appeal to everyone or even to most. But if that’s how a man builds up his brand and sells his books, who am I to judge? Especially if you can sneak in some subversive truths. (In this respect, Cioran reminds me of Michel Houellebecq, one of the last manifestations of French culture. All this goes back to Socrates-as-satyr.)

Still, we observe that many men of the Right took a more straightforward route: Maurice Bardèche avenged his brother-in-law Brasillach’s execution by continuing to write in favor of fascism, Julius Evola always stood up for the Axis and for Tradition, Dominique Venner wrote as a historian, Europe’s living memory, and committed his own seppuku, as a sacrifice to the gods . . .

Each man fights in his own way. Again, who am I to judge?

Notes

[1] Mircea Eliade, The Portugal Journal (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2010), 35.

[2] Note: detachment does not mean surrender. For those who do not understand, I recommend the Baghavad Gita, the Hagakure, D. T. Suzuki’s explication of “the Way of the Sword” in Zen and Japanese Culture, or indeed watching the countenance of the faces of men about to strike their opponent in Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Seven Samurai.

Abstract. This article is a detailed commentary on Oswald Spengler's little work "The Man and the Technique". In it we develop the concept of technicality, necessary to understand the broad perspective (zoological, naturalistic, dialectic, operatiological) outlined by the German philosopher. This is not an essay on the Technique in the objective and artifactual sense, but rather on the development of the operative capacities (visual and manual) of the ancestors of man, which led him from predation to Culture, and from Culture to decline: especially the decadence of the western peoples that have contributed most to the takeoff of this technicality

mercredi, 23 janvier 2019

Fukuyama on Diversity

By Greg JohnsonEx: http://www.counter-currents.com

Francis Fukuyama’s latest book Identity was written to forestall the rise of Right-wing identity politics, but, as I argued in “Fukuyama on Identity Politics[2],” the book is actually very useful to White Nationalists because it concedes a number of our basic premises while offering weak reasons to resist our ultimate political conclusions. This is especially apparent in his discussion of diversity.

Diversity within the Same Society Causes Conflict

One of Fukuyama’s most useful concessions is that diversity within the same state causes conflict. He opens chapter 12, “We the People,” with an account of how Syria—a racially homogeneous society with significant ethnic and religious diversity—descended into a devastating civil war in 2011.

Let’s bracket the role of US intervention in kicking off the Syrian civil war, since outside forces were only exploiting existing fault lines. Instead, let’s just ask—given that religious and ethnic diversity caused Syria to descend into war—how is the much greater religious, ethnic, and racial diversity of America a strength?

It is a good question, to which Fukuyama offers four remarkably weak answers.

Fukuyama’s first reason for making one’s homeland more like Yugoslavia is the throwaway claim that “Exposure to different ways of thinking and acting can often stimulate innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship” (p. 126). Of course we can expose ourselves to different ways of thinking and acting without changing the ethnic compositions of our societies. Furthermore, how much of this alleged innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship is due to handling the problems of diversity? After all, you can stimulate economic activity by breaking windows. Increasing ethnic diversity certainly stimulates the market for CCTVs, window bars, pepper spray, car alarms, concrete barriers, and morning after pills. But those aren’t good things.

Fukuyama’s second reason to increase the risk of a Syrian-style civil war is all the great restaurants. No, I am not kidding:

Diversity provides interest and excitement. In the year 1970, Washington D.C. was a rather boring biracial city in which the most exotic food one would dine on was served at the Yenching Palace on Connecticut Avenue. Today, the greater Washington area is home to an incredible amount of ethnic diversity: one can get Ethiopian, Peruvian, Cambodian, and Pakistani food and travel from one small ethnic enclave to another. The internationalization of the city has stimulated other forms of interest: as it becomes a place where young people want to live, they bring new music, arts, technologies, and entire neighborhoods that didn’t exist before. (p. 127)

Where to begin?

First, to say that Washington DC in 1970 was a rather boring biracial city is to snobbishly denigrate both the black and white populations of the city, who—when they weren’t clashing with one another—found it a nice place to live. (Presumably the whites who could not economically segregate themselves from blacks were pretty well gone by then.)

Second, since when is the presence of ethnic restaurants an index of social well-being—as opposed, say, to social trust, neighborliness, and other values that Robert Putnam found decline as diversity increases?[1][3]

Third, what percentage of non-whites run ethnic restaurants? Is it even 1%? I would gladly allow them to stay if we could deport the rest. But even better, if there is such a crying need for shawarma, why not learn to cook it ourselves?

Fourth, who are these young rootless cosmopolitan urbanites we are supposed to prize? Basically, they are Jews and people who think and live like them. But why should their preferences trump those of “boring” white (and black) people with families and jobs and communities?

And those “entire neighborhoods that didn’t exist before,” actually did exist before. At first they were occupied by white people, who were displaced by black riots and crime. Then they were occupied by blacks, who were displaced by hipsters driving up rents and calling in the police to enforce their preferred standards of behavior.

Diversity, in short, is not progress for all. Diversity is just a euphemism for fewer white people, especially “boring” white people who have families and yards but often lack tattoos and a taste for micro-brews. Do you really think these people won’t eventually start fighting back against their ethnic displacement?

The third reason Fukuyama gives for emulating the Star Wars cantina comes from biology. Diversity, he informs us, is “crucial to [biological] resilience” and “the motor of evolution itself.” Amazingly, Fukuyama does not see that this is actually an argument for racial and cultural homogeneity and separatism. For when two distinct species occupy the same ecological niche, the result is the destruction of biological diversity through extinction or hybridization. If human biological and cultural diversity are values, then ethnonationalism follows as a matter of course, for ethnonationalism creates barriers to the chief causes of biological extinction, namely habitat loss, competition from invasive species, hybridization, and predation.

Fukuyama’s fourth reason for becoming more like Rwanda is that diversity is valuable because immigrants “resent being homogenized into larger cultures” and “want to hold on to the world’s fast-disappearing indigenous languages, and traditional practices that recall earlier ways of life” (p. 127).

There are several problems with this point. First, it is not an argument for why increased diversity is good for the natives of a society. How is America a better place by being more accommodating to immigrants who refuse to assimilate our customs and language? Second, if immigrants want to preserve their languages and customs, they should simply stay in their homelands. If they want to move to another country, shouldn’t they have to bear the cost of assimilation rather than impose the burden of unassimilated immigrants on their new society? Third, Fukuyama himself recommends imposing assimilationist policies two chapters later. So in what sense does he regard this sort of diversity as a value at all?

Fukuyama’s arguments for diversity are so weak, one has to wonder if he is even sincere. This impression is underscored by the fact that as soon as he offers his final argument (which he takes back later), he declares, “On the other hand, diversity is not an unalloyed good. Syria and Afghanistan are very diverse places, but such diversity yields violence and conflict rather than creativity and resilience” (pp. 127–28). National unity, he claims, has gotten a bad reputation “because it came to be associated with an exclusive, ethnically based sense of belonging known as ethno-nationalism” (p. 128). But there is nothing wrong with national identity as such, only “narrow, ethnically based, intolerant, aggressive, and deeply illiberal” forms of national identity. But, Fukuyama assures us, “National identities can be built around liberal and democratic political values” (p. 128).

Fukuyama then offers six arguments for the goodness of national unity.

First, it promotes physical security, as opposed to civil war and ethnic cleansing.

Second, it promotes just government as opposed to corrupt and factional government.

Third, it facilitates economic development.

Fourth, it promotes a wide range of social trust, which is an important factor in ensuring honest government and economic flourishing.

Fifth, it makes possible the welfare state. People are willing to pay high taxes if they think they are doing it for themselves, not for parasitic out groups. This is one reason why the United States did not develop as extensive a welfare state as Scandinavia or even Canada next door. The US has a large non-white population, and dark skin has proved to be a reliable marker of those who take more from the state than they contribute. Thus we can predict that rising non-white populations in Europe and elsewhere will lead to the decline of the welfare state.

Finally, national unity makes possible liberal democracy—and all forms of self-government, really—since without unity people do not feel that they are governing themselves. Instead, some groups inevitably feel they are being governed—and exploited—by other groups. For there to be pluralistic democracy without civil war, the different parties have to believe that they are fundamentally part of the same people. People are willing to trade power with other factions only if they do not feel they are being subjugated by an alien people.

All of these arguments have merit. But one has to ask: in what sort of society are they most likely to actually pertain, a society in which there is one race and one culture—or a multiracial, multicultural society where people share a democratic creed and culture? Genetic Similarity theory would predict the former, and the empirical studies of Robert Putnam and Tatu Vanhanen bear this out.

Putnam studied 41 communities in the United States, ranging from highly diverse to highly homogeneous, and found that social trust was strongly correlated with homogeneity and social distrust with diversity. Putnam eliminated other possible causes for variations in social trust and concluded that “diversity per se has a major effect.”[2][4] The loss of social trust leads to the decline of social order. People feel isolated, alienated, and powerless. They are less trusting of social institutions and strangers and less likely to be altruistic.

Vanhanen arrived at similar conclusions from a comparative study of diversity and conflict in 148 countries.[3][5] Vanhanen found that whether they are rich or poor, democratic or authoritarian, diverse societies have more conflict than homogeneous societies, which are more harmonious, regardless of levels of wealth or democratization.

The Limits of Creedal Nationalism

Another remarkable concession that Fukuyama makes is that merely sharing the same creed is not enough to politically unify a society. National identity is not based on reason but on thumos. People have to passionately identify with their society:

. . . democracies will not survive if citizens are not in some measure irrationally attached to the ideas of constitutional government and human equality through feelings of pride and patriotism. These attachments will see societies through their low points, when reason alone may counsel despair at the working of institutions. (p. 131)

This explains a lot of the White Nationalist frustration with the post-World War II “Baby Boom” Generation. Boomer conservatives are highly resistant to White Nationalist arguments simply because their attachment to color-blind conservative civic nationalism was never based on arguments. Instead, it is based on a passionate thumotic identification with an America that is melting away before their very eyes—and they are remarkably blind to it.

This brings us to the fundamental White Nationalist objection to colorblind civic nationalism. Fukuyama wants all Americans to stop engaging in factional identity politics and instead identify with the whole of America, defined in maximally inclusive liberal democratic terms. But American civic nationalism is not a workable political ideology, because it will only be adopted by whites. Non-whites will continue openly or covertly to practice identity politics, because it benefits them.

Team strategies consistently outperform individualist strategies. Thus if whites practice color-blind individualism while non-whites practice racial and ethnic collectivism, whites will steadily lose wealth and power to non-whites. Thus, in practice, color-blind civic nationalism is simply a mechanism of white dispossession—a mechanism that blinds whites to what is happening and teaches them that blindness is a moral virtue. If you preach blindness as a moral virtue, chances are you are up to no good.

Our people’s irrational identification with American civic nationalism is a huge impediment to White Nationalism. But on balance, thumos works in our favor, because attachments to family, ethnicity, and race are far more concrete and real than attachments to an increasingly polarized and dysfunctional empire and its threadbare ideology.

Thus the best way to deprogram our people is to use thumos against itself by systematically confronting them with how their loyalty to the imperial ideology clashes with their more concrete and natural loyalties. Nothing brings home the moral obscenity of liberal civic nationalism quite like the reactions of the Tibbetts family of Iowa[6] to the murder of their daughter by an illegal alien. Some people are willing to pay quite a lot for authentic burritos.

Liberal Democratic Theory Undermines National Identities

Yet another useful concession to White Nationalism is Fukuyama’s admission that liberal democratic theory undermines national identities. This problem is brought home by the problem of immigration, which is one of the primary forces driving people toward National Populism. Fukuyama concedes that this backlash is essentially reasonable, since levels of migration are at historic highs in America, which has a long history of immigration, and Europe, which does not.

But then Fukuyama offers a stunningly dishonest rejoinder to the white Americans who want to “take back” their country. The US Constitution, he says, establishes a particular political order for “ourselves and our Posterity.” “But it does not define who the people are, or on what basis individuals are to be included in the national community” (p. 133). In fact, the Constitution makes it pretty clear who “ourselves and our posterity” are. Blacks and American Indians are not considered part of the American polity. And in 1790, when the Founders turned their attention to who they were willing to “naturalize” and allow to mix with their posterity, they specified that they be “free white people.”

Thus many white Americans correctly believe that a white republic is their birthright, a birthright that has been long eroded and is now on the brink of being wrested away from them irrevocably. Again, does anyone really believe that white Americans would not start resisting their dispossession once the endgame became clear?

Nonetheless, Fukuyama is correct to point out—citing fellow neocon Pierre Manent—that liberal theory simply assumes the existence of nation-states. Moreover, because liberalism is based on the idea of universal human rights, which prescind from ethnic and racial differences, liberal theory cannot generate borders between states. Indeed, liberalism tends to undermine nation-states and promote global government.

Surprisingly, Fukuyama rejects global government because “no one has been able to come up with a good method for holding such bodies democratically accountable” (p. 138). Moreover, “The functioning of democratic institutions depends on shared norms, perspectives, and ultimately culture, all of which can exist on the level of a national state but which do not exist internationally” (p. 138). Thus Fukuyama concludes that international bodies must be based on the cooperation of sovereign states.

But this defense of the nation-state rings hollow when one recalls that Fukuyama recommends that nation-states make a commitment to liberal democracy central to their identity, which entails that eventually there will be no meaningful differences between them, anyway.

How to Create an Ethnostate

For me, the most remarkable concession that Fukuyama makes to White Nationalism is his discussion of how national identities are created.

First, we can keep borders constant and move people across them, removing existing populations and bringing in new ones.

Second, we can let people stay where they are and move borders to fit them.

These are, of course, the two mechanisms to create racially and ethnically homogeneous states.

Third, we can “assimilate minority populations into the culture of an existing ethnic or linguistic group” (p. 141).

Fourth, we can “reshape national identity to fit the existing characteristics of the society in question” (p. 141).

These are the mechanisms preferred by civic nationalists like Fukuyama.

Astonishingly, Fukuyama also grants that “All four of the paths to national identity can be accomplished peacefully and consensually, or through violence and coercion” (p. 142). Yes, Fukuyama is saying that we can create ethnostates by moving borders and peoples in a peaceful and consensual manner, without resorting to violence and coercion. Lest some peoples mount their high horse and lecture other peoples on their historical guilt, Fukuyama also adds that, “All existing nations are the historical by-product of some combination of the four and drew on some combination or coercion and consensus” (p. 142).

But then Fukuyama pulls a fast one:

The challenge facing contemporary liberal democracies in the face of immigration and growing diversity is to undertake some combination of the third and fourth paths—to define an inclusive national identity that fits the society’s diverse reality, and to assimilate newcomers to that identity. What is at stake in this task is the preservation of liberal democracy itself. (p. 143)

Later he writes:

We need to promote creedal national identities built around the foundational ideas of modern liberal democracy, and use public policies to deliberately assimilate newcomers to those identities. Liberal democracy has its own culture, which must be held in higher esteem than cultures rejecting democracy’s values. (p. 166)

First, note that Fukuyama is treating immigration and diversity simply as problems that must be managed. This is true. But since he has only given weak reasons to value diversity at all, why stop at merely managing it?

Why not reduce immigration and diversity dramatically—or eliminate them entirely? Why shouldn’t a society try to be less like Syria, Yugoslavia, or Rwanda? It is not clear whether Fukuyama ever envisions stopping additional diversity. Will there always be “newcomers”? Why?

Fukuyama has already pointed out that it is possible to create more homogeneous societies by moving borders and moving peoples in a completely moral manner, so why are the first two options simply passed over?

Later, Fukuyama writes:

The question is not whether Americans should go backward into an ethnic and religious understanding of identity. The contemporary fate of the United States—and that of any other culturally diverse democracy that wants to survive—is to be a creedal nation. (p. 161)

No, America is not “fated” to be a multicultural society. Nor is Sweden, France, or any other white society. It was not “fate” that opened our borders and deconstructed white norms and cultures in favor of multiculturalism. It was men who decided on this experiment in social engineering, and it was men wielding the tools of statecraft and propaganda that forced it upon white societies.

These decisions can, moreover, be reversed by other, better men, and the consequences can be undone by the same tools. If it is possible for immigrants to enter white countries, it is possible for them to leave the same way. So the question really is whether white countries should want to restore themselves. Because where there’s a will, there’s a way—a completely non-violent and humane way, according to Fukuyama.

Multiculturalism is a program of social engineering that was only imposed on most white countries in the decades following the Second World War. The consequences, moreover, have been catastrophic—and they only get worse with time. For instance, second generation Muslim immigrants are more of a problem than their parents. Why should this recent experiment in social engineering—an experiment that has failed as badly as Communism—be treated as sacrosanct? Beware of Hegelians talking about “fate.”

For White Nationalists, it is not a question of wanting to “survive” as a “culturally diverse democracy.” We wish, first and foremost, to survive as a race and as distinct white nations, and we believe that white survival is not compatible with racially and ethnically diverse democracies. As I argue in The White Nationalist Manifesto[7], multicultural liberal democracy is subjecting the white race in all of our homelands to conditions that will lead to our biological and cultural extinction[8]—unless White Nationalism turns these trends around. Compared to extinction, every other political issue that divides us pales into insignificance.

Fukuyama does not address the question of whether multicultural, multiracial liberal democracies are consistent with the long-term survival of whites. And he offers no good reason for why whites should not seek to restore or create homogeneous homelands. Instead, he merely offers proposals on how to make multiracial liberal democracies work better, in order to forestall the rise of Right-wing populism. However, as we shall see in the final installment of this series[9], his proposals are astonishingly weak.

Notes

[1][10] Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies, 30 (2007).

Some aspects of the intellectual heritage of German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) have already been dealt with by the author in general terms[2] - this essay is meant to look at Schmitt’s scientific oeuvre in more detail. The recent publication of the latest book of Belgian Traditionalist publicist Robert Steuckers affords a suitable opportunity for revisiting Schmitt’ work in a more comprehensive fashion. In the Low Countries, Steuckers’ book Sur et autour de Carl Schmitt represents the first substantial monograph dedicated to the rehabilitation of Schmitt’s highly original - and highly topical philosophy of law.[3] For many years, Schmitt’s intellectual universe and life-world were effectively ‘taboo’ due to his - complex and therefore easily vulgarized - association with the Nazi regime. It is a fact that Schmitt became a member of the NSDAP in May 1933, only a few months after Hitler’s seizure of power, and that he supported Hitler’s authoritarian amputation of the Weimar institutions - as did nearly all other German men and women at the time. It is a fact that he was interned by the American occupation authorities after the downfall of the Third Reich[4] and that he consistently refused to be subjected to the politically correct ‘second baptism’ of semi-obligatory ‘denazification’. His principled stance against foreign occupation cost him his academic career and social status. This stance, however, was not inspired by any great enthusiasm - or even basic respect - for the Nazi regime: in Schmitt’s view, this regime was fatally flawed in terms of higher legitimacy and historical authenticity.[5] After Stunde Null, Schmitt simply refused the new ideological Gleichschaltung demanded by the occupying powers. Irrespective of the exact degree to which Schmitt’s work can be considered intrinsically ‘tainted’ in the context of the virulent excesses of National Socialism, the fact remains that his life’s work was placed in the same post-war quarantine that befell the life work of other great European thinkers. It ended up in history’s cabinet of curiosities, together with that of Italy’s Julius Evola, France’s Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Romania’s Mircea Eliade, Norway’s Knut Hamsun and America’s Ezra Pound.

But seventy years later it is becoming increasingly evident that the historical-materialist mythology of ‘progress’ and ‘constructability’, now raised to the status of standard doctrine (with a socialist variety in the Eastern Bloc and a liberal variety in the Western Bloc), has brought Western civilization to the brink of extinction. After the fall of Eastern Bloc Realsozialmus, the entire Western world has fallen prey to what may be termed ‘Cultural Nihilism’: a poisonous cocktail of neo-liberal ‘capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich’ and cultural-marxist ‘identity politics’ (the new ‘class struggle’ of old against young, female against male and black against white). This Cultural Nihilism is characterized by militant secularism (destroying religious cohesion), monetarized social-darwinism (destroying social-economic cohesion), totalitarian matriarchy (destroying family cohesion) and doctrinal oikophobia (destroying ethnic cohesion) and it is practised through the Macht durch Nivellierung (‘power through levelling’) mechanism of the totalitarian-collectivist Gleichheitsstaat.[6] The prime carrier of Cultural Nihilism is still the forever young ‘baby boomer’ generation of rebels without a cause, but that generation is now replacing itself by a time-less, shape-shifting ‘hostile elite’, feeding off continuous new discoveries of ‘repressed minorities’ (resentful feminists, ambitious immigrants, psychotic LBTG-activists). The power of this hostile elite resides in two distinct but intricately linked force fields: (1) the globalist institutional machinery (the ‘letter institutions’ - UN, IMF, WTO, WEF, EU, ECB, NATO) that allows it to overrule state sovereignty and electoral correction and (2) the universalist-humanist discourse of ‘human rights’, ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ that allows it to monopolize the ‘moral high ground’. This double trans-national and meta-political power position allows the hostile elite to systematically elude any responsibility for the stupendous damage it is inflicting on Western civilization. The crimes committed by the hostile elite - industrial ecocide (anthropogenic climate change, environmental degradation, diabolical bio-industry), hyper-capitalist exploitation (‘free market’, ‘privatization’, ‘social return’), social implosion (matriarchy, feminization, transgenderism) and ethnic replacement (‘asylum policy’, ‘labour migration’, ‘family reunification’) - go unpunished within an institutional and ideological framework that operates literally ‘above the law’. Only an entirely new legal framework can end the legal immunity enjoyed by the hostile elite. Carl Schmitt’s philosophy of law provides that new frame: it offers a restoration of the lost link between institutional law and authentic authority and of what is found between these two - actual justice. To restore this link, Schmitt uses the concept of ‘political theology’, i.e. the assumption that all political philosophies are shaped, directly or indirectly, by theological positions that may or may not take on an ostensibly ‘secularized’ shape. From that perspective, the political imperative of promoting institutional laws aimed at immanent justice is derived from transcendently - theologically - defined authority.

The time has come to end the entirely anachronistic and increasingly untenable ‘taboo’ on Carl Schmitt’s work and thought - and to investigate its relevance during the contemporary Crisis of the Postmodern West.[7] Robert Steuckers’ Sur et autour de Carl Schmitt permits us not only a fascinating visit to a monumental past. It also permits us to find the weapons that are needed in the here and now - it gives us access to the mighty ‘Arsenal of Hephaestus’.[8]

(*) As in the earlier review of Steuckers’ work Europa II,[9] the reviewer has chosen for a double presentation of Steuckers’ original French text - sharp and acidic as usual - as well as an English translation. As stated in that earlier review, the reviewer shares the view of patriotic publicist Alfred Vierling that the French literary culture is essentially different from the English literary culture to a degree that virtually precludes one-on-one ‘translation’. This means that French language skills are actually indispensable for any conscientious studia humanitatis. The lack of such skills among the younger generations of the West, however, is not primarily due to any intellectual complacency: it can be directly attributed to the hostile elite’s anti-education policy of deliberate ‘dumbing down’. The reviewer is therefore willing to meet younger readers half-way by presenting both Steuckers’ original text and his own somewhat ‘free’ English translation. Obviously, the reviewer acknowledges his responsibility for the less successful attempts at transposing Steuckers’ ‘biting’ Walloon-French into English. A glossary of Steuckerian neologisms is added at the end of the text.

(**) This essay is not only meant to provide a review, it is also meant as a metapolitical analysis and a contribution to the patriotic-identitarian deconstruction of the Postmodern Western hostile elite. It is important to know who the enemy is, what he aims at and how he thinks. Carl Schmitt’s life work provides an ‘anatomical’ dissection of the hostile elite’s legal philosophy - it effectively deprives the hostile elite of any authentic foundation. Robert Steuckers has achieved a brilliant rehabilitation of Schmitt’s work - the patriotic-identitarian movement of the Low Countries owes him gratitude and congratulations.

(***) On the one hand, those readers that have still been traditionally educated are asked for patience with the somewhat ‘patronizing’ explanatory notes: these are meant to assist those younger readers that have been deprived of their basic intellectual heritage by decades of anti-education. On the other hand, those readers that lack a traditional education - and that may feel ‘put off’ by any ‘pretentious’ text - are asked for an effort at bettering themselves. They should realize that what may appear ‘pretentious’ reflects, in fact, nothing else than their own stolen heritage - the heritage of Western civilization. If the patriotic-identitarian movement is meant to protect anything of value, then it is exactly that: Western civilization itself - ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ.[10]

Steuckers commences his extensive overview of the life and work of Carl Schmitt with a reconstruction of the cultural-historical roots of post-war Western legal-philosophical thought. He retraces the historical-materialist reduction - one might say ‘secularization’ - of the Western philosophy of law to the Reformation and the Enlightenment.[12] The religious wars of the 16th and 17th Centuries resulted in the temporary regression of Western civilization into a ‘state of nature’ which could only be partially compensated for by the ‘emergency measure’ of classical Absolutism during the second half of the 17th and the first half of the 18th Century.[13] This ‘emergency brake’ Absolutism is characterized by a highly stylized personification of totally sovereign monarchic power as the last protection of a traditionalist community against the demonic forces of modernist chaos. After the abolition of the old securities of the sacred and feudal order, the ‘absolutist’ monarchs intervene in order to channel the disruptive dynamics of early mercantile capitalism, the incipient civil rights movement and the escalating tendency to religious decentralization. From a cultural-historical perspective, this ultimate resort to ‘hyper-personalized’ Auctoritas can be interpreted as a temporary ‘emergency measure’: ...en cas de normalité, l’autorité peut ne pas jouer, mais en cas d’exception, elle doit décider d’agir, de sévir ou de légiférer. ‘...in normal circumstances, [such an absolute] authority does not play a role, but in exceptional circumstances, it must act in a decisive, over-ruling and legislating fashion.’ (p.4) But this absolutist ‘emergency measure’ is only locally and temporarily effective: the pioneering nations of modernity, such as Great Britain and the Dutch Republic, remain exempt - despite ‘semi-absolutist’ measures such as the Stuart Restoration and the stadtholderate of William III. Even in its heartland, Absolutism reaches its expiry date in less than a century - the American and French Revolutions mark the end of Absolutism and the final Machtergreifung of the bourgeoisie as the new dominant force in the Western political arena.

The bourgeois-capitalist Wille zur Macht is abstractly expressed in a political doctrine that is based on the effective inversion of the preceding Traditionalist philosophy of law (i.e. of the clerical-feudal ‘political theology’): this new Normativism, constructed around bourgeois-capitalist interests, abstractifies and depersonalizes state authority - Thomas Hobbes already describes it as the mythically invisible ‘Leviathan’.[14] Abstractification is achieved through ideologization and depersonalization is achieved through institutionalization: both processes are directed at the foundation and consolidation of the new bourgeois-capitalist hegemony in the political sphere. Rigid routines and mechanical procedures (‘bureaucracy’, ‘administration’, ‘legislation’) replace the human measure and the personal dimension of Traditionalist power: concrete power is replaced by abstract ‘governance’. L’idéologie républicaine ou bourgeoise a voulu dépersonnaliser les mécanismes de la politique. La norme a avancé, au détriment de l‘incarnation du pouvoir. ‘The republican and bourgeois ideology needs to depersonalize the mechanics of politics. It favours normative power over embodied power.’ (p.4) The first consistent experiment with Normativism as Realpolitik ends with the Great Terror of the First French Republic: it illustrates the totalitarian reality that necessarily results from the consistent application of the do-or-die motto that covers the bourgeois-capitalist power project in its formal (republican) as well as its informal (freemasonic) forms: liberté, égalité, et fraternité ou la mort, ‘liberty, equality and fraternity - or death’. The ethical discrepancy between the utopian ideology and the practical application of this power project is ideologically covered by - and established as a norm in - 19th Century Liberalism. Liberalism is the political ‘default setting’ of modernity. The propagandistic surface of Liberalism - its utopia of ‘humanism’, ‘individualism’ and ‘progress’ - covers its deeper substances: the pseudo-scientifically (social-darwinistically) justified economic disenfranchisement (‘monetarization’, ‘free market’, ‘competition’) and social deconstruction (‘individual responsibility’, ‘labour marker participation’, ‘calculating citizenship’) that mathematically result in social implosion (Karl Marx’ Entfremdung and Emile Durkheim’s anomie). In the long term, Liberalism results in a ‘superstructure’ that is based on a very puritanical - and therefore highly resilient - form of Normativism: Liberalism has the highest totalitarian potential of all modernist (historical-materialist) ideologies. Thus, Alexander Dugin historical analysis, translated into English as The Fourth Political Theory, points to the intrinsic - logically-consistent and existentially-adaptive - superiority of Liberalism. ...[L]e libéralisme-normativisme est néanmoins coercitif, voire plus coercitif que la coercition exercée par une personne mortelle, car il ne tolère justement aucune forme d’indépendance personnalisée à l’égard de la norme, du discours conventionnel, de l’idéologie établie, etc., qui seraient des principes immortels, impassables, appelés à régner en dépit des vicissitudes du réel. ‘...[S]till, Liberal Normativism is coercive - it is even much more coercive than the power exerted by any mortal ruler, because it does not tolerate any form of personalized autonomy with regard to its own ‘norm’ (conventional consensus, standard ideology, political correctness), which is elevated to an eternal and unapproachable principle that is permanently exempt from the vagaries of real life’. (p.5) From a sociological perspective, the totalitarian superstructure of Liberal Normativism can be described as ‘hyper-morality’.[15]

The apparently inviolable foundation of the Liberal Normative monolith in the bedrock of Postmodern social psychology raises the question of whether or not it is possible to dislodge by the application of legal philosophy. An affirmative answer to that question depends on breaking through the ‘event horizon’ of Liberal Normative Postmodernity, i.e. stepping beyond its epistemological boundary. A break-out from the ‘timeless’ dimension of Liberal Normativism is by means of an ‘Archaeo-Futurist’ formula: the simultaneous mobilization of re-discovered ancient knowledge and newly discovered strength will provide the necessary combination of imagination and willpower.

2. Through the Glass Ceiling of Postmodernism

ΔΩΣ ΜΟΙ ΠΑ ΣΤΩ ΚΑΙ ΤΑΝ ΓΑΝ ΚΙΝΑΣΩ

[give me a place on which to stand, and I will move the Earth]

- Archimedes

One of the most important childhood diseases of the patriotic-identitarian resistance movement, now rising up against the globalist New World Order throughout the entire Western world, is its inability to correctly assess the nature and power of the hostile elite. The widening (‘populist’) public anger and incipient (‘alt-right’) intellectual criticism that feeds this resistance movement are partially characterized by superficial pragmatism (political opportunism) and emotional regression (extremist conspiracy theories). Both of these phenomena can be understood as the political and ideological reflections of the natural instinct of self-preservation: in a confrontation with direct existential threats, such as the ethnic replacement of the Western peoples and the escalating psychosocial deconstruction of Western civilization, political purity and intellectual integrity simply lack priority. Still, it is of vital importance that the patriotic-identitarian movement outgrows these childhood diseases as quickly as possible - especially its ‘quick fix’ political islamophobia and its ‘shortcut’ ideological anti-semitism.[16] It should be empathically stated that this does not imply any recourse to the kind of ‘preventive self-censorship’ that is now practised by the politically correct journalistic and academic establishment with regard to legitimate cultural-historical questions that are embedded within the larger discourses of ‘islamophobia’ and ‘anti-semitism’. The patriotic-identitarian movement is bound to prioritize authentic - not merely legalistic - freedom of expression: it is bound to the position that politically correct (self-)censorship and repressive media policies are counter-productive because they increase public distrust and because they feed political extremism. The obvious ‘pride and prejudice’ of the system press (which stigmatizes every rational cost-benefit analysis of ‘mass-immigration’, ignores the ethnic profiles of ‘grooming gangs’ and re-interprets incidents of islamist terror) and the governmental policy of ‘shoot the messenger’ with regard to critical media (through ‘fake news’ projections, ‘Russian involvement’ smear campaigns and digital ‘deplatforming’) have caused the public to abandon the journalistic and political ‘mainstream’. The downfall of the traditional (paper and television) media and the splintering of the political landscape merely represent the surface reflections of this development. Now it is up to the patriotic-identitarian movement to lead the defence of the old freedoms of press and opinion, freedoms that have been now been discarded by the hostile elite as superfluous - and dangerous.[17] The task of defending Western civilization, which has been sold out by the neo-liberals and betrayed by the cultural-marxists, has now devolved upon the patriotic-identitarian movement. A correct assessment of the nature and power of the hostile elite is now its highest priority - without it, a winning strategy is impossible. A short-cut identification of the ‘enemy’ as ‘the Islam’ or a ‘Jewish world conspiracy’ simply does not stand up to cold calculus and ruthless realism required from this assessment.

The correct identification of the hostile elite requires more than a simple - albeit ethically and existentially correct - reference to its undeniably ‘demonic’ quality. The absolute evil that results from industrial ecocide, bloodthirsty bio-industry, neo-liberal debt slavery and matriarchal social deconstruction is self-evident.[18] But more is needed: it is necessary to achieve a legal understanding and a political strategy that ‘frames’ the hostile elite in a definitive manner. In this regard, Robert Steuckers’ analysis of Carl Schmitt’s ‘political theology’ is of great value: it offers the intellectual tools that are necessary to complete this - possibly greatest - task of the Western patriotic-identitarian movement.

From a Traditionalist perspective, the cultural-historical effects of Liberal Normativism are determined by larger meta-historical dynamic, i.e. the downward time spiral that Hindu Tradition interprets as Kali Yuga and that the Christian Tradition interprets as ‘Latter Days’. The historical agency of Liberal Normativism as a carrier of a contextually functional Wertblindheit is explicitly recognized in Steuckers’ prognosis: ...une ‘révolution’ plus diabolique encore que celle de 1789 remplacera forcément, un jour, les vides béants laissés par la déliquescence libérale ‘...[it is] inevitable that, someday, an even more [openly] demonic revolution than that of 1789 will fill the gaping void that has been caused by the liberal rot.’ (p.37) A first indication of the deeper ‘outer dark’ that still lies hidden beyond the Liberal Normativist facade is found in the recent monster alliance between neo-liberalism and cultural-marxism in Western politics (in Dutch politics this alliance is visible in the program of the governing coalition parties, which combines the ‘disaster capitalist’ agenda of the VVD and the ‘deep nihilist’ agenda of the D66).[21] Steuckers highlights Schmitt’s doubly philosophical and theological interpretation of the regressive cultural-historical tendency of Liberal Normativism. Schmitt draws attention to the consistent Liberal-Normativist support for pre-Indo-European primitivism (Etruscan matriarchy, Pelagianist ‘katagogic’ theology) at the expense of Indo-European civilization (Roman patriarchy, Augustinian ‘anagogic’ theology).[22] Traditionalism associates this tendency with a meta-historical movement towards a ‘neo-matriarchy’: this explains the chronological relation between the Postmodern hegemony of Liberal Normativism and typically Postmodern symptoms such as feminization, xenophilia and oikophobia.[23] In sociological terms, this phenomenology can be accurately described as befitting the development of a ‘dissociative society’.[24] The spectre of an absolute nihilist void is already casting ahead its shadow in Postmodern discourses such as ‘open borders’ (genocide-on-demand), ‘transgenderism’ (depersonalization-on-demand), ‘reproductive freedom’ (abortion-on-demand) and ‘completed life’ (euthanasia-on-demand) - discourses that are straightforwardly demonic in any authentic Tradition.[25]

Leaving aside the natural interethnic (effectively ‘neo-tribal’) conflicts of contemporary ‘multicultural societies’ (conflicting bio-evolutionary strategies, interracial libido trajectories, post-colonial inferiority complexes), the prime trigger of the existential conflict between indigenous Westerners and non-Western immigrants is found in the increasingly diabolical life-world of Liberal-Normativist Western ‘society’. For every traditional Muslim from the Middle East, for every traditional Hindu from South Asia and for every traditional Christian from Africa the Liberal-Normativist ‘open society’ or the Postmodern West not only an abstract (theological) evil but also a lived (experiential) horror. Even if the armed terror of the islamicist jihad is (a tolerated) part of the offensive ‘divide and rule’ strategy of the hostile elite in form, in substance it can also be understood as a defensive mechanism against the blasphemous and dehumanizing experience of life under Liberal-Normativist rule. From a Traditionalist perspective, it could be said that for the Western peoples an Islamic Caliphate would, in fact, represent a (very relatively) ‘better’ alternative to the bestial dehumanization that will logically result from the ‘harrowing of hell’ of fully-implemented Liberal Normativism.

Thus, the greatest enemy of all the Western peoples - in fact, the common enemy of all peoples that still live according to authentic Traditions - is politically identified: totalitarian-nihilist Liberalism. Liberal Normativism is politically realized through Liberalism: the program of the hostile elite is shaped by Liberalism. In this regard, it is important to note the fact that, since the Second World War, Liberalism has gradually gained the status of ‘standard political discourse’. Liberalism has infiltrated, disfigured and transformed its political rivals, including Christian Democracy (the Dutch CDA and CU, which have joined the liberal governing coalition without the slightest compunction), Social Democracy (the Dutch PVDA and SP, which have been marginalized through decades of compromise) and Civil Nationalism (the Dutch PVV and FVD, which have failed to formulate a viable alternative vision of society). This process has advanced to point of eradicating any trace of authentic democratic-parliamentarian opposition in key areas such as economic and social policy. Steuckers views this process of ‘politicide’ as a function of Liberalism’s intrinsic power of ‘ideological sterilization’. Even outside of the core party cartels (in the Netherlands these are represented by standard ‘governing parties’ of VVD, D66, CDA, CU and PVDA) Liberalism has become a political habitus[26] - all other parties automatically (largely unintentionally) take on the role of ‘controlled opposition’. The result is ‘mainstream politics’ (in the Netherlands it is explicitly referred as the all-levelling ‘polder model’), now dominating the entire West since the 1980’s rise of ‘Neo-Liberalism’: the rise to power of Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Ronald Reagan in America and Ruud Lubbers in the Netherlands.

4. Liberalism as Politicide

A ‘democratically elected’ parliament can never be the place for authentic debate:

it is always the place where collectivist absolutism issues its decrees.

- Nicolás Gómez Dávila

The formation of Liberalist-led party cartels and Liberalist-guided consensus politics is largely due to the simple practice of parliamentarism: the parliamentary technique of the hyper-democratically dumbed-down and hyper-regulated unrealistic ‘debate’ reduces all ‘opinions’ and ‘viewpoints’ to their lowest common denominator, which is always found in grossly materialist and totally amoral Liberalism. The all-levelling debate replaces quality with quantity (‘democracy’), thought with feeling (‘humanism’), concrete justice with abstract governance (regulation, bureaucracy, protocol) and collective future planning with individual impulse gratification. ‘Purchasing power’ always outweighs generational legacy, ‘lifestyle’ always prevails over ecological sustainability and ‘relationship experiments’ always have priority over family life. Parliamentarism is nothing but the political and institutional reflection of the collectivist levelling sentiment that underpins bourgeois Liberalism: it represents the reductio ad absurdum of politics - politics as talk show entertainment.[L]’essence du parlementarisme, c’est le débat, la discussion et la publicité. Ce parlementarisme peut s’avérer valable dans les aréopages d’hommes rationnels et lucides, mais plus quand s’y affrontent des partis à idéologies rigides qui prétendent tous détenir la vérité ultime. Le débat n’est alors plus loyal, la finalité des protagonistes n’est plus de découvrir par la discussion, par la confrontation d’opinions et d’expériences diverses, un ‘bien commun’. C’est cela la crise du parlementarisme. La rationalité du système parlementaire est mise en échec par l’irrationalité fondamentale des parties. ‘[T]he essence of parliamentarism is found in debate, discussion and publicity. Such parliamentarism may prove itself an asset in an Aeropagus [assembly][27] of rational and clear-minded gentlemen, but this is no longer the case when rigidly ideological parties are confronting each other with claims of possessing the ultimate truth. The latter debate is no longer loyal: the aim of its participants is no longer the discovery of the ‘higher cause’ through a discussion and an exchange of opinions and experiences. Herein lies [the cause of] the crisis of [comtemporary] parliamentarism. The rationality of the [present] parliamentary system fails due to the fundamental irrationality of the parties.’ (p.18-9)

It is inevitable that this self-reinforcing crisis is increasingly fed by groups that were previously ‘invisible’ in the political landscape. The escalating process of political levelling is fed by the individual ambitions and resentments of the self-appointed ‘representatives’ of supposedly ‘discriminated’ groups. Seek and you shall find: there are always more ‘under-privileged’ groups (to be invented): young people, old people, women, immigrants, homosexuals, transgenders. Totalitarian nihilist Liberalism is the deepest (maximally ‘deconstructed’, maximally ‘desubstantivized’ political sediment - and sentiment - that results from this implosive process: it is the political ‘zero position’ that remains after the all-levelling ‘debate’, i.e. after the neutralization of all attempts at political idealism, political intelligence and political willpower.

Liberalism realizes the political (parliamentarist, partitocratic) dialectics of the Liberal-Normativist ideology. In Schmitt’ view, the dialectically vicious circle that results from this ideology can only be broken by a fundamental restoration of political authority. Steuckers states this as follows: Dans [cette idéologie], aucun ennemi n’existe : évoquer son éventuelle existence relève d’une mentalité paranoïaque ou obsidionale (assimilée à un ‘fascisme’ irréel et fantasmagorique) - ...il n’y a que des partenaires de discussion. Avec qui on organisera des débats, suite auxquels on trouvera immanquablement une solution. Mais si ce partenaire, toujours idéal, venait un jour à refuser tout débat, cessant du même coup d’être idéal. Le choc est alors inévitable. L’élite dominante, constituée de disciples conscients ou inconscients de [cette] idéologie naïve et puérile..., se retrouve sans réponse au défi, comme l’eurocratisme néoliberal ou social-libéral aujourd’hui face à l’[islamisme politique]... De telles élites n’ont plus leur place au-devant de la scène. Elles doivent être remplacées. ‘In [this ideology] a [real] enemy cannot be conceived of: even to suggest the possible existence of such an [enemy] is ‘proof’ of the paranoid or obsessive mentality (always associated with an unreal and imaginary ‘fascism’) - ...there are only ‘debating partners’. With [such partners] debates are organized and these debates always end in a solution. But if, one day, this partner - always thought of in abstract terms of rational perfection - would actually refuse the debate, then the ideal [‘discussion’ model] would immediately fail. An [existential] shock would be inevitable. The ruling elite, which is [entirely] made up of conscious and unconscious adherents to [this utterly] naive and infantile ideology..., would have no answer to this challenge - in the same manner that neoliberal and social-democrat eurocrats [have no answer] to [political islamism]... Such elites do not deserve a place on the [political] stage - they have to be replaced.’ (p.245)

5. Liberalism as Anti-Law and Anti-State

A Marxist system can be recognized by its protection of criminals

and its criminalization of opponents.

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Sometime during the aftermath of the Machtergreifung of the soixante-huitards the hostile elite has taken the strategic decision to replace the indigenous peoples of the West.[28]Its underlying logic is as clear as it is ruthless. The European peoples have proven to be historically incompatible with Modernity, as it is defined by Culture Nihilism: this is why they have to be mixed with and replaced by more malleable - less intellectual, less demanding, less self-conscious - slave peoples. The European peoples are demographically infertile under totalitarian dictatorship, they are economically unproductive in urban-hedonist stasis and they are politically unreliable in debt slavery.[29] But the ethnic replacement of the Western peoples is a project with considerable risks: even the most optimally calibrated Umvolkung recipe and the most carefully calculated dosage of its various ingredients (mass immigration, ethnically selective natalist policy, affirmative action, native economic deprivation) demand a political balancing act of unparalleled refinement. To achieve the political ‘point of no return’ (the demographically-democratically checkmate of the Western peoples) the hostile elite runs the risk that its amputation-transplantation operation will fail when the double psychological and spiritual anaesthesia fails, causing the patient to awake on the operating table. Until that point is reached, the expiry date of the hostile elite depends on two main anaesthetic medicines: (1) the hedonist-consumerist defined level of ‘wealth’ and ‘wellness’ and (2) the educative-journalistic manipulated politically correct consensus. If one of these two elements fall under a certain critical measure (a measure that is gradually revised downward), the danger of the patient awakening increases exponentially. Thus, a certain minimum remnant (constantly revised downward as well) of the welfare state, labour legislation, political pluriformity and freedom of opinion must be maintained until the process of ethnic replacement has been completed. The neoliberal-globalist ideals of entirely ‘open borders’, of an entirely amoral ‘open society’ and a total social-economic bellum omnium contra omnes can only be fully realized after the ethnic replacement project has reduced the native Western population to the status of ‘endangered species’, confined to marginal ‘reservations’. Until that time, the transition process creates a legal predicament for the hostile elite: it has to carefully manage the maximum speed with which Western state institutions and laws can be demolished and replaced with Liberal anti-state institutions and anti-laws. If this demolition and replacement take place too quickly, the Liberal anti-state risks an uncontrollable backlash: an early overdose of chaos and injustice in the public sphere risks a premature alienation and collective countermovement among the native Western populace.

The increasingly grotesque side-effects of the Liberal demolition of state institutions and legal safeguards are particularly problematic in case of those privileges that are the exclusive preserve of the ‘immigrants’ (‘affirmative action’, ‘preferential treatment’, ‘housing priorities’, ‘targeted subsidies’) and of those sanctions that are explicitly aimed at the natives (student loans, commercial credit and administrative fines for natives vs. scholarships, grants and prosecution dismissal for ‘immigrants’). The contrast between the bureaucratic hurdles, fiscal pressure, labour market congestion and housing shortages faced by the native population (particularly its unfortunates: the homeless, the infirm, the poor) and the red carpet treatment (free legal assistance, free shelter and free money followed by priority housing, start-up facilities and full access to social support) provided to foreign colonists (including masses of fraudsters, thieves and rapists) is becoming more grotesque every year. As the immigrant population explodes due to ‘managed migration’ (‘Marrakesh’),‘family reunification’ (‘human rights’) and ‘child allowances’ (‘legal equality’) - always at the expense by the native population - the hostile elite risks pushing the native population into electoral resistance (‘populist parties’) and civil disobedience (gilets jaunes) too soon and too far. The hostile elite is attempting to abolish the historical gains of 150 years of Western civilization - legal recourse, labour law, social security, educational opportunity, universal healthcare, administrative integrity, responsible governance - in the space of no more than two generations. Here, the generational divide (essentially the divide between baby-boomer and post-baby-boomer) is essential because it is vitally important to ‘clean’ the collective memory of the Western populace: to make sure that inconvenient concepts such as ‘educational standards’, ‘living wage’, ‘income security’, ‘old age insurance’ and ‘justice for all’ are eradicated as quickly as possible. The hostile elite is close to achieving this aim, even if it is not fully ‘in the clear’ yet.

The Liberal anti-state and anti-law of the hostile elite has already basically reduced its hardworking, conscientious and naive indigenous subjects to ‘milk cows’ and ‘slaughter cattle’ to be exploited on behalf of a rapidly increasing mass of ruthless, unproductive, fraudulent and criminal ‘immigrants’. The sickening burden of this colonizing immigration is particularly crushing for the most vulnerable indigenous groups: day labourers, small entrepreneurs, pensioners, the physically and mentally handicapped and single-parent families. The hostile elite is silencing their feeble protests against demographic inundation and social-economic marginalization with mind-twisting and utterly cynical one-liners such ‘multicultural enrichment’ and ‘humanitarian duty’, ‘market forces’ and ‘private responsibility’. In the Dutch context, their situation is best symbolized by a caricature picture that is now frequently becoming reality: the humble indigenous bicyclist who is stopped in the pouring rain by the traffic police to be fined for a defect light, when a few yards away an ‘immigrant’ drugs lord is speeding through the red light in his sports car on the way to launder his ill-gotten riches in the ‘convenient store’ of his family clan.

But worse is yet to come - and many are starting to experience this ‘in the flesh’. Worse is the experience of indigenous girls and women: with the clients of their ‘lover boys’[30] during their school years, with their ‘rapefugee’ stalkers during their college years and with their ‘#metoo’ affirmative action ‘bosses’ during their working lives. And the worst is hidden still: the murderous decolonization (Lari 1953, Algiers 1956, Stanleyville 1964, Kolwezi 1978, Air Rhodesia Flight 827 1979) and the postcolonial atavism (Macías Nguema in Equatorial Guinea 1968-79, Muammar Kaddafi in Libya 1969-2011, Idi Amin in Uganda 1971-79, Pol Pot in Cambodia 1976-79, Saddam Hussein in Iraq 1979-2003) of the Third World bode ill for the future of the remnant native population of the West once it is fully colonized by primitive Africans and resentful Asians. Perversion is already the becoming the standard modality of Western bureaucracies and judiciaries as the indigenous Western peoples are abandoned and left to face terrorism, criminality and persecution without effective recourse. They are left with a toothless police that is caught up in red tape, a matriarchal anti-judiciary that is protecting criminals against victims, a silent media cartel that is hiding the ‘colour of crime’[31] and a perverted political system that prioritizes ‘public perception’ over public responsibility. These collective experiences, however, are now fast accumulating into a critical mass that threatens the whole ethnic replacement: they are, in fact, creating space for an effective collective challenge to the hostile elite. The moral legitimacy of the native resistance is giving it the status of an ‘Authority in the Making’, empowering it to tear up the seemingly inescapable but wholly fraudulent ‘IOU from history’ that the hostile elite is foisting on the Western peoples. The traffic light of history is flashing yellow for Liberalism. The gilets jaunes have already shown the Liberal hostile elite the ‘yellow card of history’: it is now up to the Western peoples to write out its red card - and to transfer it from the political stage to the penalty box of history.

6. The Patriotic-Identitarian Resistance as Authority in the Making[32]

And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep:

for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.

The night is far spent, the day is at hand:

let us therefore cast off the works of darkness,

and let us put on the armour of light.

- Romans 13:11-12

The basis of a successful campaign of Liberal Normativism as an ideological model and of Liberalism as a political force is the realization that both are the mortal enemies of Western civilization. For the Western peoples, the annihilation of Liberalism as a political force is an absolute precondition for a successful reconquista of state sovereignty and ethnic identity. In this case, the absolute right of survival coincides with the ethical imperative of resistance. This ethical imperative applies to all nations with ‘their back against the wall’, as formulated by Marek Edelman, the last leader of the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (‘Jewish Combat Organization’): We knew perfectly well that we had no chance of winning. We fought simply not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths. We knew we were going to die.[33]

In this regard, the Western patriotic-identitarian movement would be well advised to take to heart what Steuckers has to say about the illusion of ‘dialogue’ with the hostile elite. Reasonability and dialogue end - have to end - when one is faced with an existential threat: ...l’ennemi n’est pas bon car il veut ma destruction totale, mon éradication de la surface de la Terre: au mal qu’il représente pour moi, je ne peux, en aucun cas et sous peine de périr, opposer des expressions juridiques ou morales procédant d’une anthropologie optimiste. Je dois être capable de riposter avec la même vigueur. La distinction ami/ennemi apporte donc clarté et honnêteté à tout discours sur le politique. ‘...the enemy simply cannot be good, because he seeks my total destruction [and] my eradication from the face of the Earth: I cannot, when faced with the [absolute] evil that he represents to me, apply the legal and moral prescriptions of [a misguided] anthropological optimism - if I do so, I will become extinct. I must be able to retaliate with equal vigour. Thus, the distinction between friend [and] enemy provides the political discourse with clarity and honesty.’ (p.51)

The hostile elite, which speaks through Liberal Normativism and which acts through Liberalism, has declared war on the Western peoples and on Western civilization: the Western peoples are simply left with no other choice than to fight for their lives and to appoint a newly-legitimate ‘authority in the making’. The weapons with which the Western patriotic-identitarian resistance can deal the intellectual deathblow to the hostile elite can be found in the arsenal of Carl Schmitt - Robert Steuckers’ Sur et autour provides the key to this arsenal. One of the weapons to be found there is Schmitt’s philosophical validation of the restoration of authentic Auctoritas.

7. Decisionism as State Theory

In Gefahr und grosser Noth

Bringt der Mittel-Weg den Tod

[In danger and distress

The middle way leads to death]

- Friedrich von Logau

The weakness of the hostile elite’s pseudo-philosophy of law is ruthlessly exposed in Steuckers’ analysis of Schmitt’s basic notions of the inevitably concrete and personal dimension of all authentic forms of legitimate law and power. The concrete and personal dimensions of law and power are best illustrated in its unavoidable incarnation in the person of the judge: the person of the judge bridges the gap between abstract and historically determined law (legal code, jurisprudence) and the concrete and contemporary reality (event, circumstance). La pratique quotidienne des palais de justice, pratique inévitable, incontournable, contredit l’idéal libéral-normativiste qui rêve que le droit, la norme, s’incarneront tous seuls, sans intermédiaire de chair et de sang. En imaginant, dans l’absolu, que l’on puisse faire l’économie de la personne du juge, on introduit une fiction dans le fonctionnement de la justice, fiction qui croit que sans la subjectivité inévitable du juge, on obtiendra un meilleur droit, plus juste, plus objectif, plus sûr. Mais c’est là une impossibilité pratique. ‘The daily, inevitable and undeniable practice of due legal process contradicts the Liberal-Normativist illusion that laws and norms can [somehow] be realized without a flesh-and-blood intermediary. By imagining an ‘absolute law’ that eliminates the person of the judge, it introduced a legal fiction: a fiction that proposes a better, more just and more objective law without the inevitable subjective [mediation of the] judge. But, [of course,] no such thing is possible in practice.’ (p.5-6) No legal verdict can be conceived of without the physical presence of a Vermittler, i.e. a man of flesh and blood who is - consciously or unconsciously - shaped by values and sentiments. Thus, no legal order can be conceived of without the imprint of the specific (historically and contextually experienced) charisma of the judge. In the Postmodern context, this charisma will tend to be of a collectivist-tainted, resentment-fed and downward-directed negative nature. Parce qu’il y a inévitablement une césure entre la norme et le cas concret, il faut l’intercession d’une personne qui soit une autorité. La loi [et] la norme ne peu[vent] pas s’incarner toute[s] seule[s]. ‘Because there will always be a gap between the [abstract] norm and the concrete [case], mediation by personalized authority is a necessity. [Thus,] the law [and] the norm can never incarnate themsel[ves].’ (p.6) The same concrete and personalized dimension apply with regard to political power: the entirely abstract, institutionalized and bureaucratized form of political power that is wished for, believed in and aimed at my Liberal Normativism is simply impossible. Thus, the inevitable and indispensable incarnation of political authority remains ...le démenti le plus flagrant à cet indécrottable espoir libéralo-progressisto-normativiste de voir advenir un droit, une norme, une loi, une constitution, dans le réel, par la seule force de sa qualité juridique, philosophique, idéelle, etc. ‘...the most definitive argument against the incorrigible liberal-progressivist-normativist hope that it will be possible, one day, to achieve a real-world law, norm [and] order that is solely based on judicial, philosophical and idealist quality.’ (p.6)

Under the aegis of totalitarian Liberal Normativism, however, Postmodern West politics has no longer any space for rational debate and superior argumentation: only ‘might is right’. L’idéologie républicaine ou bourgeoise a voulu dépersonnaliser les mécanismes de la politique. La norme a avancé, au détriment de l‘incarnation du pouvoir. ‘The republican and bourgeois ideology is aimed at the depersonalization of the mechanics of politics. It favours normative power at the expense of personalized power.’ (p.4) The contemporary power of Liberal Normativism is psychosocially anchored in an anti-rational matriarchal conditioning that abolishes all personalized forms of authentic authority in a hyper-collectivist règne de la quantité.[34] Dramatic illustrations of this increasingly oppressive matriarchal reality can be found in the Western European ‘ground zero’ of Postmodernity: in the ex-nation states of ‘Anti-Frankrijk’ en ‘Anti-Germany’ the policies of anti-tradition, anti-nationalism and anti-masculine are now metastasizing into openly sadomasochistic projects of self-mutilating and suicidal Umvolkungà l’outrance. In this context, every form of collectivist resistance (parliamentary ‘opposition’ and extra-parliamentary ‘activism’) against the idiocratic and absurdist excesses of Liberal Normativism is doomed to failure because it will limit itself to pragmatic ‘symptom management’. By limiting themselves to the matriarchal-collectivist (doubly politically-institutional and psycho-social) ‘frame’ of Liberal Normativism, such parliamentary opposition (the AfD in Germany, the FvD in the Netherlands) and such extra-parliamentary activism (the Reichbürger movement in Germany, the gilets jaunes movement in France[35]) are effectively reduced to ‘lightning conductors’. There exists only one true remedy for the matriarchal-collectivist ‘anti-authority’ of Liberal Normativism: patriarchal-personalized authority as defined in Traditionalist Decisionism.

The Decisionist approach to law and politics is always concrete, and therefore also physical and personal. In legal-philosophical terms, it is primarily concerned with the physical protection of the concrete (geographically and biologically bounded) realities of state and ethnicity. In Decisionism, earthly realities always take priority over abstract norms: ist erdhaft und auf Erde bezogen [the law is earth-bound and refers to earthly reality]. In metapolitical terms, it proceeds from the recognized necessity of personalized authority in order to meet physical calamities as well as overdoses of ‘normative’ power. It sanctions personalized authority for the effective management of existential threats against the state and the people: Ausnahmezustand, ‘state of emergency’, Ernstfall, ‘case of emergency’, Grenzfall, ‘borderline case’. This highest command authority is based on the (temporary) suspension (in fact: correction) of (normative) law through its (temporary) personification: this emergency measure is applied whenever the legal order, the power of the state or the survival of the nation are undermined or shaken. ...[E]n cas de normalité, [cet] autorité peut ne pas jouer, mais en cas d’exception, elle doit décider d’agir, de sévir ou de légiférer. ‘...[U]nder normal circumstances, th[is] authority stands outside daily life, but in case of emergency it is obliged to act, to rule and to legislate [directly].’ (p.4) This ‘emergency power’ kicks in case of existential threats from without (natural disaster, enemy invasion) and from within (rebellion, treason). In Traditional societies, this personalized authority is permanently (institutionally) available in the ‘reserve functionality’ of sacred office. In pre-modern Western societies, this reserve functionality is institutionally represented in the Monarchy, regulated either through election or succession. The sacred nature of the highest command authority is derived from the transcendental (and therefore anagogical) concept of state and nation that prevailed in all pre-modern societies. Carl Schmitt’s philosophy of law - inspired by the Traditionalist-Catholic state theory of Donoso Cortés[36] - retains this sacred element in its transcendental definition of a holistically conceived unity of state, nation and society. This unit, as qualified through the ancient notions of Unitas Ordinis, ‘Unified Order’, Societas Civiles, ‘Civil Society’ and Corpus Mysticum, ‘Mystical Body’, is taken to represent a creation that is naturally organic as well as divinely ordained - as such it can never be wholly encompassed by any political institution. The man that fate has called upon to defend the life of this mysterious ‘creature’ is held to be imbued with a sacred vocation of the highest order.

From this follows the double theological and legal imperative of a trans-democratic and trans-secular state authority which is simultaneously open in a downward (earthly) and upward (heavenly) direction and which guarantees the historical continuity of the nation(s) that it represents. A built-in permanent Decisionist ‘reserve option’ - a (temporal) ‘dictatorial’ command structure to deal with the Ernstfall - is an indispensable part of this state authority. Within the Traditionalist philosophy of law of the Christian world this reserve option is always ‘framed’ - and limited - by the higher transcendental principle of Caritas, which is explicitly expressed in the key principles of Catholic politics: Community, Solidarity and Subsidiarity. Caritas: the ‘anthropologically pessimistic’ Christian ethical imperative and pious practice of magnanimity with all creatures that need protection and assistance. First and foremost these are those people that are vulnerable, incapacitated or weak-minded - children, women, the poor, the sick, the handicapped and the dying. But these are also the animals and plants that cannot speak up for themselves and that are subject to man’s dominion. Noblesse oblige. In the Traditionalist philosophy of law of the Christian world the Monarchy was the highest natural and legitimate carrier of Decisionistically defined Auctoritas: ...les familles royales, qui incarnent charnellement les Etats dans l’Ancien régime, offrent de successions de monarques, différents sur le plan du caractère et de la formation, permettant une plus grande souplesse que les régimes normatifs et normateurs. Elles permettent la continuité dans l’adaptation et le changement, apportés par les héritiers de la lignée. En ce sens, les monarchies constituent des contrepoids contre le déploiement purement technique de la raison normative, qui fait basculer les Etats dans l’abstraction et apportent, in fine, la dictature. ‘...royal families - which are made to literally embody the state during the [Absolutist] ancien régime - offer a [continuous] succession of [ever new generations of] monarchs differ in character, upbringing and education: they offer a [‘built-in’ and] much greater flexibility than ‘normative’,... [democratically liberal] regimes. In this sense, monarchies offer a counterbalance against the purely ‘technocratic’ rule of normative ‘reason’ that reduces states to legal abstractions and, eventually, to [normative] dictatorships.’ (p.36) In a Monarchy the principle of Subsidiarity postulates an additional and derivative role for other ‘privileged’ institutions as well: the Clergy and the Nobility are called upon to carry many responsibilities - they are burdened with a secondary Decisionist Pflicht zur Tat, or ‘obligation to act’. All of these Traditional institutions were assumed to take on a number of natural and legitimate obligations on the basis of an existential quality that is simply unimaginable under the aegis of Liberal-Normativist modernity - a quality that can best be grasped in a number of concepts of more ‘aristocratically minded’ languages: solemnidad, ‘solemnity’, gravedad, ‘gravity’, Haltung, ‘composure’, Würde, ‘dignity’. In this regard, Steuckers points to the ‘Roman Form’ that is essential to this existential orientation - an orientation that was largely eliminated from the originally Roman-Catholic Church during the 20th Century aggiornamento that is now associated with Second Vatican Council (1962-65).[37] This Roman Form views ...l’homme... comme un être combattant, un être sans cesse préoccupé de limiter le chaos naturel des choses, de donner forme au réel, de maintenir les continuités constructives léguées par l’histoire... ‘man... as a warrior creature, a creature that is waging an incessant struggle against the chaotic state of the natural [world and that is called upon] to give structure to the reality [around himself and] to maintain the constructive continuities that he has inherited from history...’ (p.41)

This Roman Form is deconstructed in the utterly false ‘anthropological optimism’ of Liberal Normativism, which sets ‘self-made’ - cosmologically ‘autonomous’, sinless ‘free’, morally ‘self-determining’ - ‘modern man’ aside from Divine Creation, the Divine Order and Divine Providence. Liberal Normativism does not offer - cannot offer - any alternative for the Roman Form that it has ‘deconstructed’: Liberal Normativism is an exclusively negative ideology that can only thrive on denial, deconstruction and destruction. In political terms, it represents the abdication of Fortitudo, ‘fortitude’, and its replacement with administrative chaos and legal impunity. In economic terms, it represents the abdication of Temperantia, ‘self-restraint’, and its replacement with greedy materialism and unbridled consumerism. In social terms, it represents the abdication of Castitas, ‘chastity’, and its replacement with public feminization and private immorality. In psychological terms, it represents the abdication of Humilitas, ‘humility’, and its replacement with megalomania and narcissism. Thus, in the sense of Carl Schmitt’s politische Theologie, Liberal-Normativism can be interpreted as the political application of theological antinomianism.

8. The Antinomianist Project of the Hostile Elite

errare humanum est, perservare est diabolicum

[to err is human, to persist is diabolic]

Liberal-Normativism is entirely incompatible with any form of positive (eudaemonic, anagogic) - let alone Traditionalist (holistic, Decisionistic) - philosophy of law or concept of state. Its antinomianism - its pretence to be exempt from Divine Order and the Divine Law - places it outside and under and transcendentally inspired form of philosophy and statecraft. In the words of Robert Steuckers: Le normativisme se place en dehors de tout continuum historique puisque la norme, une fois instaurée, est jugée tout à la fois comme un aboutissement final et comme indépassable et, en théorie, le normativisme exclut toute dérogation au fonctionnement posé une fois pour toutes comme ‘normal’, même en cas d’extrême danger pour les choses publiques. ‘Normativism places itself outside all forms of historical continuity because, as soon as it is installed, its norm achieves the status of necessary and unsurpassable finality. Strictly speaking, normativism excludes any kind of exemption from the once-and-for-always established ‘normal’ functionality [of state power], even if the greater good is threatened in an unprecedented manner.’ (p.35) The epistemological and ontological ‘steel cage’ of Liberal Normativism closes with mathematical precision - in its doctrinal perfection, it wholly excludes all corrective possibilities. In this regard, Steuckers designates the legalism of Liberal Normativism as the ultimate arcanum of Western Postmodernity. This pharisaic legalism guarantees the (mentally preventive) ‘deconstruction’ of all authentic visions of a societas perfecta. It literally rules out the Decisionist (pragmatic, flexible, temporary) Auctoritas that is built into every Traditionalist concept of state power and philosophy of law.

In the chapter La décision dans l’oeuvre de Carl Schmitt, ‘The Decision in the Work of Carl Schmitt’, Steuckers provides a precise analysis of Schmitt’s intellectual Werdegang. He points to the remarkable parallelism between Schmitt’s intellectual development and the 20th Century development of the Liberal-Normativist epistemological-ontological ‘steel cage’. The three phases that Steuckers distinguishes in Schmitt’s work and life can be interpreted as three phases in the development of the antinomian project of the hostile elite, i.e. three phases in the construction of the Liberal-Normativist totalitarian dictatorship that is nearing completion under the aegis of Western Postmodernity. Steuckers names each of these three phases after the historical function of the ‘decision-maker’ - the symbolic personification of highest command power - during the phase in question. In the framework of this essay, which aims at a ‘short anatomy of the ideology of the hostile elite’, it is useful to briefly review each of these three ‘decision makers’ according to an improvised - artificial but investigative - ‘timetable’.

(1) The phase of the Beschleuniger, the ‘Accelerator’, which covers the forty years between two symbolically important years in Western history, viz. 1905, marking the first military-political victory of a non-Western over a Western great power (the Russo-Japanese War) and the ‘constitutionalization’ of the last Traditional Western autocracy (First Russian Revolution), and 1945, marking the final military-political victory by late-modern trans-nationalism (Grossraum, American and Soviet superpower) over the classic-modern nation-state (Lebensraum, Axis powers).[38] This phase is characterized by an ‘engineering ideology’ that allows for a technical acceleration of power, in the sense of a chronological break-through as well as a spatial break-out. Here, ‘1905’ expresses a double breaking-point in terms of significant power expansions in technique (submarine exploration, aviation, ether communication, spectrum analysis) as well as cognition (Einstein’s annus mirabilis, the Weber Thesis, de Saussure’s semiotics, Durkheim’s social fact-finding). The technical suppression of the classic-modern nation-state during this phase starts with an acceleration of sea power (1905 marks the launch of the Dreadnought and the start of the Naval Arms Race) and ends with a break-out into literally supra-terrestrial power: the launch of V-2 Wunderwaffe number MW18014 on 20 June 1944 marks the start of the Space Age and the ‘Trinity Test’ of 16 July 1945 marks the start of the Nuclear Age. It is ironic that the pursuit of revolutionary and transformative forms of power was most explicitly incorporated in the ideologies of the geopolitical losers of 20th Century, viz. in Italian Futurism and in German Technical Idealism.[39] In this regard, Steuckers points to the fact that Schmitt’s legal-philosophical analysis of the economically and technologically motivated Beschleuniger can only be properly understood as an expression of the new ‘titanic’ ontology that is incarnated in German Technical Idealism, i.e. the same ‘spectral’ spirituality that inspires technocrats of the Third Reich such as Albert Speer and Wernher von Braun. The German Technical-Idealist aim of transformative Beschleunigung also characterized the parallel philosophical explorations of Martin Heidegger.[40] Here it should be noted that the search for a way out of the dead-end of Western Postmodernity would benefit from a systematic revaluation of the ideal content of German Technical Idealism - such a revaluation would be much more interesting than the endless ruminations over its ideological weight. A revaluation of German Technical Idealism can proceed from its emphasis on a productive (qualitatively measured) rather than a commercial (quantitatively measured) economy and on an explorative rather than a utilitarian science.

(2) The phase of the Aufhalter, the ‘Inhibitor’, which covers the forty years between the Götterdämmerung of German Technical Idealism and the Promethium Sky over Hiroshima[41] from 1945 till 1985. 1985 is not only the year of Carl Schmitt’s death; it is also symbolically significant as the year after George Orwell’s 1984 and as ‘point of no return’ in anthropogenic global warming - it marks the point at which the Postmodern ‘fall into the future’[42] becomes inevitable and at which all ‘inhibitions’ fail. This phase is characterized by a protracted ‘delaying action’ of the (political, social, cultural) traditional institutions of Western civilization against the rising tide of (doubly technical-industrial and psycho-social mobilized) proto-globalism that starts to flood the Western heartland in 1945. During this phase, these traditional institutions (Monarchy, Church, Nobility, Academy) are gradually pushed back in their role as Katechon. As Aufhalter the Katechon represents the ‘shield of civilization’ that surrounds any Traditional society.[43]Le katechon est le dernier pilier d’une société en perdition; il arrête le chaos, en maintient les vecteurs la tête sous l’eau. ‘The katechon is the last pillar of a society in dissolution: it holds back the [forces of] chaos by holding [its] vectors below the surface.’ (p.10) During this phase, the roots of authentic philosophy of law are gradually cut away: its Ortungen (as expressed in Schmitt’s adage Das Recht ist erdhaft und auf die Erde bezogen, ‘the law derives from the Earth and refers back to the earthly realm’) are abolished in a global process of de-naturalization, de-territorialization and de-location. During this phase, the Katechon institutions are no longer able to stop the literally all-mobilizing but teleologically negative process of globalization - they mere retain a residual function as a temporary inhibitor.[44] The political reflection of this cultural-historical process is found in the deliberate globalist demolition of the nation-state: states and ethnicities are stripped of their sovereign rights and authentic identities. The geopolitical force field is increasingly dominated by an all-mobilizing, all-liquefying and border-less thalassocracy: the all-monetarizing ‘sea power’ that gradually expands outwards from its Atlantic-Anglo-Saxon heartland through tides of money and commerce.[45] Globalist fata morgana’s such as ‘universal human rights’, ‘international law’, ‘free market mechanisms’ and ‘open borders’ are raised to the status of ‘norm’ in the political arena. L’horreur moderne, dans cette perspective généalogique du droit, c’est l’abolition de tous les loci, les lieux, les enracinements, les im-brications. Ces dé-localisations, ces Ent-Ortungen, sont dues aux accélérations favorisées parles régimes du XXe siècle, quelle que soit par ailleurs l’idéologie dont ils se réclamaient. ‘The modern horror that finds expression in this genealogy of law is the eradication of all loci - all placements, all roots [and] all enclosures. These ‘displacements’, these Ent-Ortungen, result from the accelerations that are favoured by all 20th Century regimes, irrespective of the [formal] ideological [discourses] that they claim to represent.’ (p.10)

(3) The phase of the Normalisateur, the ‘Normalizer’, approximately coincides with the Postmodern Era. During this phase, the structural inversion of the traditional institutions and values of Western civilization is basically completed. The political-institution and legal-philosophical role of the Katechon, which was previously determined by the positive (anagogic) trajectory of Western civilization is now reversed and replaced by that of the ‘Normalizer’, i.e. by the political-institutional and legal-philosophical ‘anti-christ’ in pursuit of the negative (katagogic) norm of globalist Postmodernity. This is the phase of fully-fledged Liberal Normativism. Steuckers points to the ‘Weimar Standard’ as the ‘factory setting’ of Liberal Normativism: this standard provides, as it were, the ‘sacred’ reference point and the ideal form of secular-bourgeois Liberalism. The thalassocratic ‘New World Order’, enforced by the ‘letter institutions’ (UN, IMF, WEF, EU, NATO), implements this ‘Weimar Standard’ on a global scale, hijacking the technical (digital, virtual) innovations that are now directly linking ‘borderless’ products and services to ‘borderless’ demands and emotions (world wide web, social media, virtual reality). Instability becomes the standard modality in all spheres of life. In the political sphere, ‘open borders’ prevail. In the social sphere, ‘open relations’ prevail. In the psychological sphere, ‘open access’ prevails: relations are reduced to ‘role-playing’, interactions are reduced to narcissist ‘ego communication’ and intimacies are reduced to the ‘pornosphere’. In the cultural sphere, ‘open sources’ prevail: knowledge is reduced to ‘resource management’ and publicity is reduced to ‘(b)log activity’ - Schmitt uses the term Logbücher. The spiritual ‘melt-down’ of Western civilization during this nearly literal new ‘Age of Aquarius’ is a fact. Against this background the role of the ‘Normalizer’ becomes clear. La fluidité de la société actuelle... est devenue une normalité, qui entend conserver ce jeu de dé-normalisation et de re-normalisation en dehors du principe politique et de toute dynamique de territorialisation. Le normalisateur, troisième figure du décideur chez Schmitt, est celui qui doit empêcher que la crise conduirait à un retour du politique, à une re-territorialisation de trop longue durée ou définitive. La normalisateur est donc celui qui prévoit et prévient la crise. ‘The fluidity of society... has [now] become ‘norm’: the [dialectic] process of de-normalization and re-normalization is permanently put beyond the grasp of political power and territoriality. The normalizer, the third avatar of the ‘decision-maker’ in Schmitt[’s work], is appointed to manage all crises in such a way as to prevent any definitive or prolonged return to the [exercise of] political power or re-territorialization. Thus, the normalizer is the one that foresees and prevents such crises.’ (p.14) Effectively, the ‘Normalizer’ is charged with the permanent maintenance of the Liberal-Normativist anti-order: he must prevent the widespread recognition of the Ernstfall and the resulting declaration of a state of emergency. In religious terms, this would be the classical function of the ‘anti-christ’. This ‘Normalizer’ is now incarnated in the hostile elite of the Postmodern West. The functionality of the hostile elite as ‘Normalizer’ explains the extreme forms of its antinomian project: institutional oikophobia, rabid demophobia, politically correct totalitarianism, Orwellian censorship, matriarchal ‘anti-law’, idiocratic anti-education, social deconstruction and ethnic replacement.

9. The Decisionist Alternative

In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man,

and brave, and hated and scorned.

When his cause succeeds, the timid join him,

for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

- Mark Twain

An answer to the question of whether or not the fast-growing patriotic-identitarian movement in the heavily battered nation-states of the West is able to politically destroy the globalist New World Order in its old heartland will depend on its meta-political - philosophical, ideological - ability to break out of the ‘frame’ of Postmodernity, which was here identified as the ‘steel cage’ of Liberal-Normativism. Within the limited framework of this essay, extensive consideration of this problem is impossible - all that can be done here is to indicate the approximate direction in which this ability must be sought.

Martin Heidegger already pointed to the profound psycho-social conditioning that follows from the ontological quality of Western Modernity. Liberal Normativism can be defined as the psycho-social reflection of this ontological quality, which Heidegger exposes as embodied in the Modern-Western Gestell, or ‘technical frame’. Jason Jorjani has pointed to the necessity of an explicit re-orientation on the Techne as an autonomous and self-creative force field that determines this Gestell: only a brand-new technical-idealist ‘re-thinking’ of this Techne will provide control over the Gestell. Jorjani has started this process of re-thinking: his Archaeo-Futurist approach encapsulates this Techne and is thus able to break through the epistemological ceiling of historical-materialism. Jorjani’s break-out from historical-materialist discursive dialectics has delivered a fatal blow to the Liberal-Normativist ideology that is based upon these dialectics - but only if and when that break-out is followed up by a ruthless exploitation of its final (political, economic, social, cultural) consequences. In terms of this exploitation, Carl Schmitt’s philosophy of law is highly relevant, because it offers a possibility of an Archaeo-Futurist deconstruction of Liberal Normativism in its political and legal guises. It provides a ‘crowbar’ with which to wrench open the political-legal ‘steel cage’ of the Liberal-Normativist anti-state and anti-law. This crowbar is found in Decisionism, as sanctioned by Carl Schmitt’s philosophy of law. Carl Schmitt breaks down the (abstract, deconstructive) discursive dialectics of Liberal Normativism by the (concrete, constructive) Realdialektik of Decisionism. Decisionism recovers the habitus of Ordnungsdenken and it restores the authentic (flexible, pragmatic) counter-norm of the Obrigkeitsstaat. Decisionism offers the patriotic-identitarian movement an Archaeo-Futuristically valid deconstruction of Liberal Normativism.

Steuckers’ reconstruction of Schmitt’s philosophy of law provides the building blocks of a new, Archaeo-Futuristically framed Decisionism as a remedy for Liberal Normativism. An Archaeo-Futuristically determined Decisionism will have to take its cue from the institutional and legal-philosophical Western Tradition: Tout avenir doit être tributaire du passé, être dans sa continuité, participer d’une perpétuation, faute de quoi il ne serait qu’une sinistre farce, un projet éradicateur et, par là même, criminel. ‘Every [vision of the] future must recognize itself as heir of the past and as [carrier of historical] continuity: otherwise, it will be nothing more than a sinister farce, a project of destruction and, therefore, a criminal [enterprise].’ (p.60-1) At the same time, it is important to build in an important caveat: Steuckers points to the need for a pragmatic application of Decisionism, befitting the contemporary reality: ...il y a... deux dangers à éviter, celui de caricaturer la tradition, [comme] éloigné[e] de tout véritable souci du...’ politique politique’, et celui de l’abandonner au profit de maigres schémas normativistes. ‘... two dangers must be avoided: [first,] a caricature of tradition, divorced from an effective concern for... a [always pragmatic] ‘political politics’, and, [second,] an abandonment of tradition in favour of substance-less normativist schemes.’ (p.63) Accordingly, there can be no neo-reactionary return to anachronistic forms of Decisionism: ...les régimes pré-libéraux... étaient plus stables sur le long terme, [m]ais... on ne pourra pas les restaurer sans d’effroyables bains de sang, sans une sorte d’apocalypse. [On] doit dès lors éviter l’enfer sur terre et œuvrer au maintien des stabilités politiques réellement existantes. ‘...the pre-liberal forms of government [that ruled the pre-modern world]... were more stable in the long term, [b]ut... they cannot be restored without a horrific bloodbath [and] a kind of apocalypse. [It] is imperative to avoid hell on earth and to work within the framework of such political stability as can still be found.’ (p.31) Thus, modern Decisionism should avoid anachronistic purism: it should seek organic development.

Key elements of such an organic development can be found in Steuckers’ reconstruction of the historical trajectory of Western Decisionism. Partially secularized, but still transcendentally-inspired aspects of a Decisionism that serves the ‘greater good’ can be found in a series of chronologically sequential but organically related notions that are scattered throughout the history of the Western philosophy of law. These include: the Corpus Mysticum of Francisco Suárez (1548-1617), the volonté générale of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), the élan vital of Henri Bergson[46] (1859-1941), the omul nou of Corneliu Codreanu (1899-1938) and the Reichstheologie of Erich Przywara (1889-1972). These notion transcend all 19th and 20th Century ‘isms’: the transcend fascism (which tends to wrongly view the state as an aim instead of a means), nationalism (which tends to wrongly ascribe an active instead of a passive role to the nation) and parliamentarism (which tends to wrongly prioritize procedures over problem-solving). Thus, there exists an uninterrupted (semi-)Traditionalist continuity that develops alongside - and in constant opposition to - the gradual modernist devolution that has now resulted in the Liberal Normativist New World Order, realized through the (trans-national and informal) potestas indirecta of the hostile elite. This alternative Decisionist continuity offers a guideline for an Archaeo-Futurist deconstruction of Liberal Normativism: it offers an exit from the total Staatsdämmerung of neo-Liberalism and the permanent Ersatz-Revolution of cultural-marxism.

In the peripheral areas of the West, the first signs of a proto-Archaeo-Futurist reaction to Liberal Normativism are already becoming visible: these are the ‘Enlightened Decisionisms’ of Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and Recep Erdogan, very accurate defined as ‘illiberal’ by the Liberal-Normativist propaganda machine. The Western hostile elite is now scrambling to prevent the spread of this Decisionist reactive movement into the Western heartland, a spread that can already be discerned in phenomena such as ‘Brexit’, ‘Trump’ and ‘M5S’. The hostile elite is opting for a Flucht nach vorn, a ‘flight forward’, by an accelerating of its core strategies: the introduction of totalitarian matriarchy (anti-white ‘multiculturalism’, anti-male ‘transgenderism’, anti-intellectual ‘political correctness’), the fostering of social implosion (‘no-fault divorce’, ‘birth control’, ‘sexual revolution’) and the enforcement of ethnic replacement (‘refugee quotas’, ‘migration pacts’, ‘high-skill migration’).

The success of the Western patriotic-identitarian movement in its struggle with the hostile elite depends not only on an intellectual re-armament through the re-instatement of a Decisionist (meta-)political discourse, but also on the inner re-enactment of a deeper Wehr- und Waffen-Instinkt, or ‘defence and armament instinct’.[47] In this regard, Steuckers emphasizes the importance of traditional Western ethics of the crusader, i.e. the double monastic and knightly archetype of the ‘military Katechon’. There is a direct psycho-historical relation between the Crisis of the Modern West and the abolition of the Western monastic and knightly traditions. Steuckers points to the crucial role of crusader ideal in Western history, which tends to recur in highly stylized forms in heroic figures such as Johann Tserclaes Count von Tilly, commander of the Catholic League from 1610 till 1632, Prince Eugene of Savoy, victorious over the French hereditary enemy at Blenheim (1704) and Oudenaerde (1708) and over the Turkish archenemy at Zenta (1697) and Belgrade (1717). The capacity of the Western patriotic-identitarian movement to mount a credible Decisionist challenge against the Liberal-Normativist hostile elite will also depend on a re-enactment of the Western Wehr- und Waffen-Instinkt. This means the capacity to wage war in all spheres: physical, psychological, intellectual and spiritual. The ‘training’ required to reach a sufficient level of ‘fitness’ will have to start with a therapeutic confrontation with the psycho-historical traumas of the West. Session One: a positive inner re-enactment of the existential attitude that is expressed in - obviously German and Prussian - ‘taboo words’ such as Beharrung, ‘persistence’, Kleinkrieg, ‘guerrilla’, Zermürbung, ‘attrition’, totaler Widerstand, ‘total resistance’, totaler Krieg, ‘total war’. Session Two: a transformative projection of this re-enactment into brand-new ‘catch phrases’ that call for peaceful but effective civic resistance: ‘Take the Hit’ (Jared Taylor) and ‘Great White Strike’ (Frodi Midjord). Session Three: the development of an unwavering commitment through a permanent confrontation with the enemy: inward in what the Islamic Tradition terms al-jihad al-akbar, or ‘Greater Holy War’, and outward in what the Augustinian Tradition terms the bellum justum, or ‘Just War’. The discipline and courage that will result from these exercises will bring the hostile elite to its knees soon enough: the hostile elite maybe malicious - it is also cowardly.

Noch sitzt ihr da oben, ihr feigen Gestalten.

Vom Feinde bezahlt, dem Volke zum Spott.

Doch einst wird wieder Gerechtigkeit walten, dann richtet das Volk.

Dann genade Euch Gott!

[Still you are on top, you cowardly figures,

paid by our enemy, ridiculed by our people.

But one day righteousness will prevail - on you will be judged by our people.

On that day, may God be with you!]

- Theodor Körner

10. The Eurasianist Dimension

à tous les coeurs bien-nés que la patrie est chère

[to all well-born hearts the fatherland is dear]

The struggle against the globalist hostile elite, which is thinking and operating on a planetary scale, demands more than a patriotic-identitarian intervention at the national level within each Western nation-state: it also demands a certain degree of geopolitical coordination at an international level. In this regard, Steuckers’ brilliant ‘update’ of Schmitt’s Land und Meer analysis[48] is highly relevant. Steuckers points to the fact that the approaching apogee globalism - effectively the apogee of Atlanticist-Anglo-Saxon thalassocracy analyzed by Schmitt - is characterized by ‘pyro-politics’, i.e. a compulsive resort to globalist ‘arson’ in all parts of the world that are not directly accessible to sea power-based globalism. Les forces hydropolitique cherchent à détruire par tous les moyens possibles cette terre qui ne cesse de résister. Pour parvenir à cette fin, l’hydropolitique cherchera à provoquer des explosions sur les lambeaux de continent toujours résistants ou même simplement survivants. L’hydropolitique thalassocratique va alors chercher à mobiliser à son profit l’élément Feu comme allié, un Feu qu’elle ne va pas manier directement mais confier à des forces mercenaires, recrutées secrètement dans des pays ou des zones urbaines en déréliction, disposant d’une jeunesse masculine surabondante et sans emplois utiles. Ces forces mercenaires seront en charge des sales boulots de destruction pure, de destruction de tout ce qui ne s’était pas encore laissé submerger. ‘The hydro-political powers are pursuing the destruction of all land[power] that persists in resisting [globalist thalassocracy] with all means at their disposal. To achieve that aim, hydro-politics is seeking to provoke explosions in all remnants of continent[al power] that continue to exist, or simply continue to survive. To this end, thalassocratic hydro-politics is attempting to mobilize the Fire element as an ally - an [element] that it cannot apply directly, but which it entrusts to those mercenary forces that it secretly recruits from the unemployed surplus male youth [found] in [backward] countries and derelict suburbs. These mercenary forces are committed to the ‘dirty work’ of wanton destruction - [to] the destruction of everything that has not yet allowed itself to be submerged [by globalism].’ (p.241)

Steuckers points to Schmitt legal-philosophical validation of a geopolitical vision that offers Europe an alternative to globalist pyro-politics: a European Monroe Doctrine. This alternative finds its legal-philosophical validity in the Decisionist priority of earthly Realpolitik over abstract ‘normative politics’: das Recht ist erdhaft und auf die Erde bezogen, ‘the law derives from the Earth and refers back to the earthly realm’. In the geopolitical vision of Schmitt that has been reconstructed by Steuckers, the atrocious atavism of globalist pyro-politics is directly caused by the philosophical regression that runs parallel to America’s rise as a thalassocratic superpower - the American intervention in the First World War marks the fatal turning point. ...[L]e droit n’existe pas sans territoire et... les civilisations se basent sur une organisation spécifique de l’espace (Raumordnung), d’où découle un jus publicum admis par tous. En Europe, de la fin du Moyen Age jusqu’au début de notre siècle, l’histoire a connu un jus publicum europaeum où l’on admettait que chaque Etat, chaque Nation menaient une guerre juste de son point de vue. Ce respect de l’adversaire et des [motives] qui le poussent à agir humanisera la guerre. Avec Wilson, on assiste à un retour à la discrimination entre les ennemis car l’Amérique s’arroge le droit de mener seule une guerre juste. ‘...[T]here can be no law without territory and... all civilizations base themselves on their own particular Raumordnung, or ‘spatial order’, from which they derive a jus publicum, or ‘public law’, that is recognized by all. From the late Middle Ages till the beginning of the [20th] Century, the history of Europe is determined by a jus publicum europaeum which recognizes the legitimate right of every State and every Nation to wage war, commensurate to its lawful interests. This respect for the enemy and for the motives that cause him to act led to a [relative] ‘humanization’ in [European] warfare. But during [the presidency of Woodrow] Wilson, there is a regression into discrimination between enemies, because [under his leadership] America claims the exclusive right to wage a just war.’ (p.19)

The abstractly normativist philosophy of law that underpins globalist geopolitics and that continues to follow the Wilsonian path can only be deconstructed by a systematic return to concrete legal-philosophical Ortungen, i.e. by literal re-territorializations and the reconstitution of multiple place-bound legal orders. This is the legal-philosophical basis for a viable multipolar geopolitical order - a multipolarity that forms the basis for the Neo-Eurasianist project proposed by Alexander Dugin.[49] Dugin’s work reflects the re-territorialization of the Russian State and Nation after the seventy-year de-territorialization of the trans-national Soviet project. Thus, what Steuckers already predicted in 1985, before Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika, has come true : Quand les Russes cesseront de se laisser gouverner par de vieux idéocrates, ils seront à nouveau eux-mêmes: le peuple théophore, le peuple porteur du sublime. ‘When the Russian stop allowing themselves to be ruled by old ideocrats, they will again be what they were before: the theophoric people, the people that carry the Sublime’. (p.27) The miraculous resurrection of Russia from the ashes of Soviet Communism can inspire the Western peoples: it sets a precedent for their own resurrection from the ashes of Liberal Normativism.

Thus, the basis of a Eurasianist ‘Monroe Doctrine’ that can protect the peoples and civilizations of Eurasia from globalist thalassocracy must be sought in a concrete legal-philosophical Ortung. Si l’Europe a un droit à l’identité, il convient de définir cette identité à la lumière du concret, en rappelant les lourdes concrétudes de l’histoire et sans ressasser ces pseudo-arguments complètement stériles qu’avancent tous les fétichistes adorateurs d’idéaux désincarnés. Parce que l’Europe n’est pas d’abord une idée, belle et abstraite... L’Europe, c’est d’abord une terre, un espace, morcelé en Etats nationaux depuis le XVIIe siècle, balkanisée avant la lettre en son centre géographique depuis ce pré-Yalta que furent les traités de Westphalie conclus en 1648. ‘If Europe has the right to an identity, then it is necessary to define that identity in the light of concrete [reality], recalling the burdensome concrete facts of [its] history without regressing into the entirely vacuous and sterile pseudo-arguments that have been launched by the adoring fetishists of abstract ideas. Because Europe is not a beautiful and abstract idea... Above all, Europe is a territory, a space that has been divided up into nation-states since the 17th Century, and that has been ‘balkanized’ avant la lettre since the proto-Yalta of the Westphalia Treaties signed in 1648.’ (p.25) Accordingly, the Eurasianist project aims at re-territorializations: politically in restored state sovereignty, socially in restored ethnic identity and economically in restored autarky (i.e. a maximum of self-sufficiency in the production of food, energy and industry for each of its regional ‘welfare spheres’). L’économie, par la crise, nous défie et nous accuse d’avoir fait fausse route. La géopolitique nous dicte ses vieux déterminismes que personne ne peut contourner. Il n’y a que nos volontés qui vacillent, qui ne suivent pas l’implacable diktat du réel et de l’histoire. ‘[Chronic] economic crises are challenging us and they prove to us that we have chosen the wrong path. Geopolitics forces us to deal with the older [earth-bound] realities that cannot be overturned by anybody. It is only our will that is [still] lacking: [we should recover our] determination to follow the incontrovertible signposts of [earthly] and historical reality.’ (p.27)

To defeat the globalist hostile elite, the patriotic-identitarian movement of the West must gain insight into the enemy’s mind and motives. In this respect, it has much to gain by simply revisiting the great thinkers of the Western Tradition. It therefore owes a great debt of gratitude to Robert Steuckers for providing updated access to the rich heritage of Carl Schmitt - and for providing the weaponry it needs to destroy the hostile elite.

Behold, I have created the smith that bloweth the coals in the fire,

and that bringeth forth an instrument for his work;

and I have created the waster to destroy.

No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper;

and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn.

[4] On the day of Hitler’s death Schmitt was arrested in Berlin by Red Army troops, but he was released almost immediately after a short interview. Later, he was re-arrested and interned by the Americans as a potential suspect in the Nuremberg Trials. Plettenberg, the place of Schmitt’s birth, residence and death, is located in Westphalia and it was therefore located in the American Zone of Occupation.

[6] A reference to the title of a work by German legal philosopher Walter Leisner.

[7] For convenience sake, the ‘West’ will here be defined as the agglomerate of European nation-states that are historically associated with the Western Roman/Catholic Tradition rather than the Eastern Roman/Orthodox Tradition – in short: Western Europe plus the overseas Anglosphere.

[8] In Classical Antiquity (Greek) Hephaestus (Latin: Vulcan) was the smith of the gods and the guardian divinity of smithery: German Schmitt is English ‘Smith’.

[10] The ‘laconic’ bon mot of Spartan king Leonidas at the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC), where he faced hopeless odds and was summoned by his Persian enemy to put down his weapons - the meaning is a stronger version of ‘Come and take them’.

[11] An oblique reference to the title (and contents) of the main work of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.

[13] An important cultural-historical reflection of this regression may be found in Thomas Hobbes’ mid-17th Century concept of a universally projected (proto-social-darwinist) bellum omnium contra omnes.

[19] For an overview of the most important cultural-historical phenomena that coincide in this ‘superstructure’, cf. Alexander Wolfheze, The Sunset of Tradition and the Origin of the Great War (2018) 9-12.

[20] A bio- and psycho-social analysis of the cultural-historical effects of Liberal Normativism may be found in the work of German sociologist Arnold Gehlen (1904-76). His structural opposition between (anagogically directed) Zucht and (katagogically directed) Entartung allows for the objectively scientific calculus of the Liberal-Normativist process of de-socialization (social ‘deconstruction’).

[21] The VVD (‘People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy’) is the ex-‘classic liberal’ and now utterly corrupt banksterite-globalist party of PM Mark Rutte; the D66 (‘Democrats [19]66’) is the ex-‘progressive liberal’ and now militantly anti-normative (anti-royalist, anti-national, anti-family, anti-religious) party that was until recently led by Alexander Pechtold, who had to resign after a series of scandals in the public and private sphere.

[22] A theological reference to an early Christian doctrinal controversy that was originally resolved by the recognition of the doctrine of original sin (Augustine 354-430) and the rejection of its denial by Pelagius (360-418).

[25] The spectre of the ultimate totalitarian state, i.e. a life-world in which the entire social and individual sphere is controlled by the state, already provided the central theme of 20th Century dystopian literary classics such as Jevgeny Zamjatin’s My (1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

[27] A reference to the hill near the Acropolis where the Athenian senate met during Classical Antiquity.

[28] A proto-type strategy of ethnic replacement is found in the political writings of one of the ideological founders of the trans-national project ‘European Union’, Richard Count von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894-1972). The possible existence of an anti-European ethnocidal ‘Kalergi Plan’ to implement his vision is the subject of a controversial conspiracy theory, but that vision itself is as clear as it needs to be: The man of the future will be of mixed race. Today's races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals. (Praktischer Idealismus p.22-3, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Coudenhove-Kale... ).

[32] A reference to Carl Schmitt’s legal philosophical analysis of the partisan as ‘authority in the making’ in the context of the popular insurrections led by Mao Tse-Tung in China, Vo Nguyen Giap in Vietnam and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara in Congo.

[33] On 8 May 1943, Marek Edelman succeeded to the highest command position after the suicide of Mordechai Anielewicz in the bunker of 18 Mila Street. The author had the privilege of speaking to several eye-witnesses of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – he lived near Edelman in the Polish city of Lodz (Edelman was anti-zionist, fought for Poland during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and thereafter lived in Lodz till his death in 2009).

[35] References to, respectively, the German civil rights movement that denies the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Germany and the French civil rights movement that demanded the resignation of President Macron.

[36] A reference to the Spanish political philosopher Marquis Donoso Cortés (1809-53).

[38] Chronological terminology according to the scheme of Alexander Wolfheze, The Sunset of Tradition and the Origin of the Great War (2018), 390-2 (Early Modernity 1488-1776, Classic Modernity 1776-1920, Late Modernity 1920-1992, Post-Modernity 1992-present).

[39] Cf. Alexander Wolfheze, The Sunset of Tradition and the Origin of the Great War (2018) 237ff.

[40] A first systematic attempt at resuming the Heideggerian line of exploration, directed at a break-through of the historical-materialist Gestell of Western Modernity and a break-out into the ‘spectral space’ that encapsulates it, is found in the work of Jason Jorjani.

[41] A reference to Jason Jorjani’s ‘magical’ interpretation of the ontological (Atlanticist) transformation of Japan, enacted in the collective experience of nuclear warfare.

[44] Carl Schmitt projected this role on Adolf Hitler as ‘Protector of the Law’ (der Führer schützt das Recht) against the revolutionary power of atavist chaos that was (temporarily) disabled during the Nacht der langen Messern, the ‘Night of the Long Knives’.